Boehner's 'Plan B' sweetened with GOP wish list for screwing poor people

If there's any question that House Speaker John Boehner has been having trouble rounding up his caucus to support any deal on the fiscal cliff curb, his "Plan B" alternative proves it. It's so loaded up with stuff to hurt poor people, it could only be a creation of Boehner's efforts to keep his caucus together. Here's what it does to raise taxes on the poor.

The bill doesn't include extensions for the expansions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the American Opportunity Credit (AOC) that were included in the 2009 stimulus. Which means that the "working poor, on average, would see taxes go up between $1,000 and $1,500 dollars." Few, however, making more than $100,000 see their taxes increase. But wait, that's not all.

Not content just to make poor people pay more taxes, Boehner is taking stuff away from them, too in the companion bill to "Plan B," the sweetener bill that contains replacement cuts for the automatic cuts included in last years' Budget Control Act.

That bill voids both the military spending cuts and domestic spending cuts set to take place in 2013 and replaces them with a host of cuts to domestic spending, including:

' Cuts to food stamps that could knock millions of low-income Americans out of the program;
' Cuts to Meals on Wheels, a program that delivers meals to seniors or other individuals who are unable to prepare their own food;
' Cuts funding to health exchanges that will be created under Obamacare and funding for Medicaid included in the same law;
' Cuts to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that will yield no cost savings, but will make bailouts of big banks more likely;
' Denying the Child Tax Credit to the parents of American children, if the parents are undocumented immigrants.

Is that enough to bring over the fringe of his extremist caucus, enough to make them relent on taxes for people making over $1 million? Maybe. But some of the outside groups, like FreedomWorks, Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, are not appeased. You might see this "sequester replacement" bill pass with only Republican votes and "Plan B" fail.

1:06 PM PT: As Armando points out, what isn't in Boehner's "Plan B" is chained CPI. Now's a good time for it come off the table.