Obama should highlight Bay Area in his State of the Union
When President Obama presents his plan to level the playing field — just a bit — between the wealthy and not so wealthy in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, he could point to the Bay Area as the perfect testing ground.
Since 2008, the median income in the Bay Area has fallen by 9 percent.
Over the previous two business expansions, in the 1990s and the one leading up to the financial crash, median incomes grew.
Obama proposes increasing the top capital gains tax from 20 to 28 percent, closing the “trust fund loophole,” which enables certain inheritances to be passed along tax-free, and imposing fees on financial institutions with over $50 billion in assets, according to a White House fact sheet.
Unsurprisingly, Obama’s “simpler, fairer tax code that responsibly invests in middle-class families,” as touted by the White House, has already been pronounced dead on arrival.
“The president needs to stop listening to his liberal allies who want to raise taxes at all costs and start working with Congress to fix our broken tax code,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, over the weekend.
Last week Gov. Jerry Brown’s office handed out $31 million in tax credits to Bay Area and California companies creating or expanding jobs in the state.
The awards are projected to help 56 companies create approximately 4,900 jobs and generate over $900 million in investments in California, said the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development.
Bay Area recipients in the latest round include Arkay Acquisition, a bus manufacturer in Livermore; Neustar, a cloud data analytics company in San Francisco; MAC Thin Films, a film coating manufacturing company in Santa Rosa; and East Bay Ophthalmology in Pinole.