Bill Clinton: We'll need middle-class tax hikes to balance the budget

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” said Clinton, who has earned tens of millions of dollars since leaving office. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from] when I was president” – before the Bush tax cuts.

The former president’s remarks about his own tax rate seemed to be a reference to Obama’s “Buffett Rule,” named after billionaire Warren Buffett, which proposes higher taxes for the wealthiest Americans. Clinton asserted that when he was at the White House, “very few people” thought they were being overtaxed.