SAN ANTONIO – Congress missed its own deadline by a day, but lawmakers finally approved a deal to keep the country from going over the fiscal cliff.
President Barack Obama still has to sign it into law but hasn’t said when he’ll do that.
So what does it all mean for you?
A lot of people are asking if their taxes go up. A lot of lawmakers are trying to say no – not for the middle class.
But that’s only half the story.
Walk inside Guillermo’s restaurant downtown and you’ll meet Guillermo himself: the owner behind the counter serving up food and keeping up with financial news.
"As a small business owner you have that responsibility and you have to want to grasp it,” he says.
He’s been doing his homework on the fiscal cliff.
"How would my employees and my customers be impacted?" Guillermo describes his concerns.
Here are his answers: top earners will see their income taxes go up. Those are families making more than $450,000 a year and individuals making more than $400,000.
Everyone else pays the same rate.
"For the bulk of us, for 99% of us, our tax rate will stay at the Bush tax rates,” Guillermo says.
But everyone’s paycheck will be smaller because something called the payroll tax is going up. That means more money from our paychecks will go into social security than before. If you make $50,000 a year, you’ll pay $1,000 more in taxes.
Guillermo says the deal’s not perfect but it is progress.
"It did show that as difficult as it was they are able to work together,” he says.
And Congress has its work cut out in 2013. Our fiscal crisis is actually a triple whammy: taxes, spending and debt limit. But this time around, Congress only dealt with taxes.
Congress set another deadline to talk about spending but it’s two months away.
