Joe Biden: “I would be happy to. Let me be straight about exactly what this amendment would do. People whose tax bracket up until…”

“I would be happy to. Let me be straight about exactly what this amendment would do. People whose tax bracket up until this year was 39.6 percent, having had it drop down to 35 percent--so there is no false advertising here, the Biden-Kerry-Feinstein-Chafee, et cetera, amendment would raise, beginning in 2005, their tax bracket back up to 38.2 percent, still a percentage point and a half less than it was a year ago but 2 point something percent higher than it is today. That is what it would do. By the way, I will tell my colleagues who these folks are. People who pay at the top rate have an average income--well, it is unfair to average. As Samuel Clemens, or rather Mark Twain, said, all generalizations are false, including this one. So I want to be completely straight about this. The average income in that top 1 percent is $1 million a year. At a minimum, people who would be affected by this have to have an income, before standard deductions and exemptions, of over $400,000 in gross income. Others will fall into this category if their taxable income after deductions is over $312,000. But that is after; that is net. That is taxable income. OK. So we have the picture where people--the way I am told by the Joint Tax Committee, by Brookings and others, we may find an exception to this, but there is nobody making $400,000 a year gross who does not have standard deductions and exemptions. By the way, this does not impact on their capital gains, which is taxed at a different rate.”