Timothy Geithner (shown) speaks at the Congressional Hispanic Institute Conference. Geithner: End Bush tax cuts for wealthy

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Monday defended the White House position that decade-long tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans should expire, pleading the Obama administration's case in what is quickly becoming the most intense pre-elections debate in Washington.

Geithner, speaking at the Congressional Hispanic Institute Conference, highlighted the impact that extending the cuts could have on the deficit while giving a nod to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who indicated Sunday he would vote for a package that didn't extend breaks for the wealthy if it were his "only option."


"We welcome recent indications that Republicans won't hold middle-class tax cuts hostage to their desire to have us go out and borrow $700 billion from our children just to make permanent tax cuts for the top 2 percent [of] earners in the country," Geithner said. "If they mean what they say, there's no reason to delay moving ahead with tax relief for the middle class."

But the congressional politics of the issue aren't so simple — particularly in the Senate. Later Monday, independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced his support for temporarily extending all of the Bush-era tax cuts, joining a growing cadre of moderate Democrats who are reluctant to increase taxes in the middle of a recession. The decision on whether, and how, to extend the tax policies in place since 2001 is set to take center stage on the Senate floor after the upper chamber moves a small-business bill this week. But while Geithner says "Congress should move quickly to extend the middle-class tax cuts," Republicans in the Senate would prefer to take their time.

A top GOP aide said that an already struggling White House and Democratic Party are "vulnerable" on the issue of raising taxes during a recession and that, heading into November, Republicans will continue to make the fight over the policy as public as possible.

"Democrats are extremely vulnerable on this issue if they push it, so we're going to spend a lot of time talking about it," the aide said. "It's not going to be a short debate."

But Geithner's speech Monday revealed some of the Democratic strategy in selling the position that the wealthiest Americans should not continue to receive tax breaks after they are set to expire in January. He said the tax cuts the White House supports would go to more than 97 percent of American small businesses and 98 percent of working Americans before taking a veiled dig at former President George W. Bush.

"It's critical that we give those families and those businesses the confidence today that those tax cuts are going to be extended. This is important for businesses, important for consumer confidence and important for continued economic growth," Geithner said. "We can't afford to go back to the policies of the past decade when we passed large tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans without paying for them and saw little impact on job creation and years of stagnation in middle-class wages."