Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade accused President Obama of “threatening tax hikes for everyone in order to get what he wants” over his proposal to let income taxes on the top 2 percent of earners rise to their 1990s levels. That is a completely misleading way to describe a popular proposal that maintains current income tax rates for 98 percent of families -- a proposal that Obama successfully campaigned on.

Furthermore, the Senate has already passed legislation extending the middle-class cuts, but the Republican leadership refuses to allow a vote on it in the House. (House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has said she will try to force a vote if Republicans continue to refuse to move the legislation forward.)

On January 1, the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 are scheduled to expire, and tax rates will rise for all workers. This increase will cost the average middle-class family about $2,000 and represents a substantial portion of the budget changes set to kick in next year that economists warn will induce a new recession.

Obama's proposal has broad support among the population. A recent Washington Post/ABC poll found that 60 percent of Americans “back higher taxes on higher incomes,” a result that exactly matches the figures from Election Day exit polling. A poll from United Press International found that "[m]ost U.S. voters say they believe the wealthy should be taxed more" and that support for higher taxes on the wealthy “sweeps across gender, education, race, and region.”

During the December 3 edition of Fox & Friends, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin helped Kilmeade push this specious narrative. Goodwin falsely claimed that Obama “wants Congress to give him the power to raise taxes now on the top 2 percent of income and put off entitlement reform and spending reductions until later.”

Obama has actually signed over $1.5 trillion in spending cuts into law and has proposed $360 billion in specific cuts to Medicare. He also signed the Affordable Care Act, which reduced unnecessary Medicare expenses by hundreds of billions of dollars.