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The discussion of raising or lowering taxes is silly. A large number of poor people pay no taxes, and most wealthy people pay nowhere near the listed tax rate for their bracket. You can raise the top tax rate to 99% and Mitt Romney would still have paid under 15%, so would Warrent Buffet - because when they earn money it isn't 'income' most of the time. FICA ends at 110K, so anyone who earns 110K pays the same FICA contribution as anyone who earns 40M. Income tax is far from being the only taxes that people pay, and most of the other forms of taxation disproportionately hit the middle class, not people who are wealthy or poor.
Step 1 to fixing the economy is obliterating the phonebook sized tax regulations and simplifying it down to a small pamphlet the average citizen can fully comprehend, with bright line rules that can not be circumvented or loop-holed. Once you have everyone counting ALL of their income and paying taxes based on the listed rates... THEN you can talk about what the actual rates should be and if we should raise or lower them.
Incidentally if you did that, people like Romney would suddenly be paying 2x or 3x their taxes from 2011. People in the middle class would be paying the same exact amount they already are... and nobody's tax rate would rise or be lowered a single point. Go figure.
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