Ending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would add $1.4 trillion in revenue over the next 10 years, more than covering the congressional “super committee’s” deficit reduction target, according to the National Priorities Project.

The bipartisan joint special committee has failed to agree on a plan to cut the budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, triggering a number of automatic spending reductions that will take effect beginning in 2013.

Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans are set to expire at the end of 2012, but many Republicans want to make the cuts permanent, and they have refused to accept any deal that would allow them to expire.

According to a recent report from the NPP, eliminating Bush-era tax cuts for just the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans would realize $1.4 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade. And most Americans are in favor of such a measure. A recent poll conducted by George Washington University found that 66 percent of Americans support tax increases for the wealthy.

The average Bush tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in 2011 amounted to $66,384, which is far more than the average annual income of the other 99 percent ($58,506), the report found.

Additional findings include that Bush tax cuts for the richest 5 percent of Americans added an average of 14 percent (about $100 billion) to federal deficits each year from 2001 to 2010, and that another decade of such cuts will cost more than twice as much because they were slowly phased in after 2001.  

Visit www.nationalpriorties.org for several rolling tickers that track the impact of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.