“The Bush tax cuts – people didn’t need them, and they weren’t even asking for them, and that’s why they need to be less, so that we can pay for universal health care and other initiatives,” Obama said in a June 2007 Democratic debate.

I don’t know about you, but pretty much every, no every, person I know (including me) come mid-April bitches and moans about how taxes are too high. Ergo, people, at least the ones I know, are always asking for tax cuts and they do need these cuts to support their families with their income.

Surely Obama was just grand-standing back in 2007. And he understands that people need these cuts now more than ever… right? Actually, no.

President Obama’s senior economic advisor, Lawrence Summers, made clear in an interview on NBC in January that any idea of renewing the Bush tax cuts, set to expire in 2010, is a dead issue.

So how will the expiration of these cuts at the end of next year affect you?

Before we answer that, let’s take a look at exactly what is changing with respect to individual income taxes.

• The 10% bracket will increase to 15%.
  
• The 25% bracket will increase to 28%.
  
• The 28% bracket will increase to 31%.
  
• The 33% bracket will increase to 36%.
  
• The 35% bracket will increase to 39.6%.

On the surface these may look like small hikes – between 3 and 5 percentage points. But the effect these increases have on the amount you pay is much greater.

Consider that jumping from the 25% bracket to the 28% bracket (a rise of 3 percentage points) results in 12% higher taxes. Don’t believe me? Let’s quickly check the math.

If you’re an individual currently in the 25% tax bracket, you make between $33,950 and $82,250 per year. For simplicity, let’s say you’re somewhere in the middle, at $50,000 per year. And we’re also not going to consider deductions because that muddies a simple issue.

So if you make $50,000 a year and are in the 25% tax bracket (not counting deductions), you’d pay income taxes of $12,500. But if you make that same $50,000 and are taxed at 28%, your tax burden is $14,000. This reflects an increase in the amount you have to pay of 12%.

Back to the bullet points above. Let’s go through the list one more time and show the increase in tax burden.

• The 10% bracket will increase to 15%... a tax burden hike of 50%.
  
• The 25% bracket will increase to 28%... a tax burden hike of 12%.
  
• The 28% bracket will increase to 31%... a tax burden hike of 10.7%.
  
• The 33% bracket will increase to 36%... a tax burden hike of 9.1%.
  
• The 35% bracket will increase to 39.6%... a tax burden hike of 13.1%.

Even though the Obama administration said it would not raise taxes on the poor or middle class, by letting the Bush tax cuts expire, that’s exactly who is going to be impacted the most. For the year 2011, the tax burden of the lowest-wage earners in the country will climb a whopping 50% from where it is today.