Geithner, in a recent interview, when confronted with the question, did not rule out new taxes:
STEPHANOPOULOS: I know you believe that passing health care is central for getting the deficit under control. But independent analysts say even with that you are going to need to find new government revenues. The former deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman said it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues should increase but how. Is he right?
GEITHNER: George it is absolutely right and very important for everyone to understand we will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong enough to sustain unless we can convince the American people that we’re going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established.
The administration will break lots and lots of promises to middle class and poor people, and they are trying slowly prep them for aggravated looting, aka taxation.
Just recently the AP published Federal tax revenues plummeting:
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
“Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
“This just adds to the problem.”
The Coming US Tax Receipt Shortfall is no longer coming. It is here and now.