WASHINGTON - Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Republicans are betting voters will agree that tax cuts for the rich could provide a trickle-down boost to the ailing economy, relying once again on Reagan-era principles sacred to the GOP. It's a tough pitch to a skeptical electorate, and so far polls show a majority of Americans surveyed disagree with Republicans on extending tax cuts to the wealthiest 3percent of taxpayers. 'It's not the easiest sell in the world' to defend tax cuts for the rich, acknowledged Dan Judy, vice president of Ayres, McHenry & Associates, a Republican polling and political-consulting firm in Virginia. 'But the way they're doing it is effective: by concentrating on the effects on small business,' he said. 'I think most people basically get the point that if you raise taxes on the wealthy, you're hurting the job creators.' President Obama, meanwhile, is hoping to turn popular discontent to his advantage by painting Republicans as pandering to fat cats. Congress is wrestling with the looming expiration of tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 during the presidency of George W. Bush. Obama is pushing a plan to preserve the tax cuts for everyone except individuals who make more than $200,000 and joint filers with income over $250,000. Taxpayers above those thresholds would pay higher rates, but only on the additional earnings. Republicans want the tax cuts extended for everyone, not just lower- and middle-income wage earners. They are skirting broadsides about how much Wall Street millionaires will save under their proposal, or how much the cuts will add to the deficit. Instead, they talk about preserving Main Street's ability to create new jobs. It is a narrowly tailored argument. Only about 2.5percent of the nation's 36million small-business owners make so much money that they would lose the tax break on higher earnings under Obama's plan, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington study group. But at the same time, say conservatives, business operators in that category are the ones who can afford to hire more workers, making it doubly important to keep them strong and able to expand the job pool. 'This is a tax increase that will specifically hit the growing, profitable small businesses and take away money that would otherwise go to reinvesting,' said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative advocacy group in Washington. 'It's a body blow to the small-business community.' State-by-state breakdowns are not available, but if the Tax Policy Center's 2.5percent is applied to Massachusetts small businesses, the owners of some 15,000, out of a total of 607,000, would fall into the top brackets and thus would see taxes on a portion of their earnings rise. Those select small-business owners are an important economic engine for the Bay State, said Bill Vernon, Massachusetts state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying group. 'A lot of small-business owners have already been forgoing some income in this economic situation to keep the people they have employed now,' he said. 'If you raise taxes on them, you're denying income from the very people who will be making the decisions whether to hire more people.' Yet many economists and policy specialists downplay the boost that preserving Bush-era tax cuts on the wealthy would give to the economy. The cuts were not intended to be an economic fix in the first place, said William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. 'They were designed as a way to give surpluses back to the American people,' he said. 'They were never designed as a stimulus package.' The question of what constitutes a 'small business' has begun to enter the debate. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan group cited by both parties in their arguments, said in a July report that many of those wealthy taxpayers earn their business income through limited partnerships or S corporations. Those are IRS designations - classified by the agency as 'small businesses' - that allow those firms to avoid corporate taxes, instead having their profits taxed through individual owners. Many of these businesses are anything but mom-and-pop operations: in 2005, for instance, more than 19,000 of them had receipts of more than $50million, the report said. Almost all Democrats in Congress voted against the cuts in 2001 and 2003. They now fear allowing them to expire on all Americans would place too much of a shock on the economy as it struggles to emerge from recession. To say the least, allowing tax cuts to expire on low- and middle-income families would be politically hazardous, even though estimates say it will cost $1.8 to $2trillion over the next decade. The cost to keep cuts in place for the wealthy is $700billion over 10 years, which President Obama argues is too expensive. McConnell has said he has rock-solid backing in his stance from the Senate's Republicans; Scott Brown of Massachusetts is lined up behind the minority leader. Democrats are having a tougher time keeping their ranks in line. A group of moderate and conservative House Democrats was collecting signatures on a letter calling for Democratic leaders to offer a bill extending tax cuts for all Americans. 'We are in listening mode,' said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who heads the House Democrats' campaign committee. Several centrist Senate Democrats, including Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Evan Bayh of Indiana, have generally sided with the Republicans who argue that the tax cuts should be extended for everyone. Voter sentiment, however, is mostly aligned with Obama's approach. A New York Times poll published Thursday found that 53percent of American say the president's plan is a good idea, compared with 38percent who disagree. For Democrats, that is an improvement from the findings of a Gallup poll last month, which found 44percent favored the Obama plan; 37percent favored extending the tax cuts to all wage earners; 15percent said the cuts should expire. Both polls showed the sentiments fell sharply along party lines. Republican strategists are not in complete lockstep on the party's strategy. Republican political consultant Raynard Jackson, president and CEO of Raynard Jackson & Associates in Washington, D.C., thinks the Republican Party has talked itself into 'an intellectual box' by supporting the extension of all the tax breaks without any plan to offset them with spending cuts. 'Either we stay true to our fiscally conservative values,' he said, 'or we're going to continue adding the national debt.' Heading into a Republican luncheon, Senator Robert Corker of Tennessee said he is firmly behind McConnell, although he said larger questions need to be asked. 'What is the appropriate percent of our (gross domestic product) that the government should have? That's page one,' he said. 'Around here, we tend to get into skirmishes about things that are on page three or four.' Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Mom and pop or fat cats? 