President Barack Obama rarely misses a chance to call on upper-income Americans to pay more taxes.

But his annual budget is doing more to target middle-class taxpayers than any of his previous proposals, calling for caps on deductions, changes in the way some tax benefits are calculated and a big hike in cigarette taxes — all proposals that would make middle-class Americans pay more.

"It's a new paradigm," said Bob Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. This is the first budget he's presented that has proposed raising taxes on people below the $250,000 thresholds he's maintained over the past five years."

It also has some Democrats worried, especially those who represent districts where their constituents make a good salary but don't see themselves as rich stand to get hit.

"It's a concern," Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a Pennsylvania Democrat who represents some of Philadelphia's suburbs, told POLITICO in reference to Obama's proposed deduction cap. For many people, the mortgage tax deduction is your biggest deduction. It's very significant. And just as the housing market is coming back, there's a question about the timing of that."