Today, President Obama will meet with a dozen corporate CEOs at the White House to discuss the looming fiscal cliff. As he seeks to harness a consensus on his plan to raise taxes, the President has neglected to include a group hardest hit by his proposed tax hikes: small businesses.

In an effort to build a coalition in support of his tax hike plan, Obama recently met with big liberal labor groups like the SEIU and AFL-CIO. It should come as no surprise that union bosses like Richard Trumka praise the tax hike plan.

Today’s meeting with CEOs, however, seems like a desperate attempt to demonstrate to the American people that there is some sort of agreement within the “business community” for the President’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax hike plan. There is nothing further from the truth.

The Obama plan will raise taxes on a majority of small business profits and hit those companies which employ a majority of Americans who work for them. His plan to raise the top two marginal income tax rates (from 33 and 35 percent today to 36 and 39.6 percent, respectively) is a hike in America’s small business tax rate that doesn’t even include Obamacare’s 3.8 percent small business surtax.

Don’t be fooled. His plan does not simply target “millionaires and billionaires.” It targets successful small companies and according to Ernst and Young, it will kill 710,000 small business jobs.  Perhaps that explains why leaders from this community were not invited to the White House.

“The American public is not stupid. They may have given the President a second term but they certainly did not give him a mandate to kill 710,000 small business jobs,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “To continue to pretend that raising taxes on small business owners is a good idea that will create jobs and protect the middle class is disingenuous at best. No amount of tax hikes will fix Washington’s overspending problem.”

[PDF of Press Release]

Posted by Paul Blair on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 1:52 PM EST

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