Orrin Hatch: “today I join my colleagues in expressing my disappointment in President Obama, in his failure to provide real leadership…”

“today I join my colleagues in expressing my disappointment in President Obama, in his failure to provide real leadership when our Nation needed it the most. While his failures can be observed across the board, when it comes to taxes and the impending fiscal cliff, the President has put our entire economy in jeopardy in order to serve his own political interests. At the end of this year, the bipartisan tax relief signed into law not only by President Bush but by President Obama as well is set to expire. Virtually every taxpayer in America will see their taxes go up if Congress and the President do not act to steer us away from this fiscal cliff. Objective analysts, including the CBO, have stated that if we were to let the tax relief expire under current economic conditions, it would likely lead to another recession. Yet, rather than working with the Republicans to extend the tax relief and to aid our recovery, the President has once again sought to divide the American people by using the top marginal tax rate as political football. In 2010 the President acknowledged that raising taxes in the midst of a weak economic recovery was bad policy. That is why at that time he signed into law the full extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax relief.…”