Understand this. Yes a tax hike on your wages kind of sucks. But it works in both directions. A tax cut on $300,000 is also a tax cut on income of $10 million or even $5 billion of income. You may laugh at somebody reporting $5 billion in ordinary income. But that is about what Mark Zuckerburg reported when he exercised a bunch of stock options when Facebook went public. But in his case it was a one time deal and he is now in a position to never pay any taxes again. He can just take out a personal loan secured by all his billions of remaining Facebook stock and perpetually roll the loan over. Meanwhile the $5 billion is a non cash tax deduction by the Facebook Corp.
A lot of other wealthy people ranging from top executives, wealth business owners, to NCAA football coaches, even an Oregon T&F coach have similar situations. They would have to report a huge lump sum of income in one year but then they have a huge mountain of after tax wealth accumulated. A lot of it comes from deferred compensation. Companies are allowed to reward key executives with deferred bonuses where huge amounts of money are put aside each year and allowed to accumulate earnings tax free on the condition that the executive stays with the company. After a number of years when the executive leaves the company they are then forced to report that income that was deferred and accumulated. It can be in the millions and it is taxed at ordinary rates.
Another situation is when a business owner sells his business and he has millions of dollars of equipment that he used to defer and avoid paying taxes for years through the use of accelerated depreciation. The catch is that when he sells that equipment he has to "recapture" all that depreciation and report it as ordinary income immediately in the year of sale. Imagine some business owner who has been doing that for 20 years and now wants to sell his whole business and retire. He is facing a huge tax bill.
This is why I think Romney and George W before him were so obsessed with income RATES in particular and why Obama folded like a lawn chair when Republicans demanded that he not raise rates for any income tax bracket. There is a massive amount of money in the economy that has been deferred over many years while the economy has been booming. Its concentrated in the hands of a relatively few truly super rich people not some $300,000/year doctor in San Francisco. To leave top marginal tax rates unchanged is a huge windfall for them.
The upshot is that lower rates may sound good to you. But it also creates a huge tax break for super wealthy people and a corresponding big hole in the deficit. That comes back to you in the form of higher inflation.
An upper middle class wage earner in the top income tax bracket with a secure job should have nothing to fear from all the tax cuts expiring.