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I think that people see the potential raising of these taxes as a problem because they see the Bush/GOP tax rates as the base from which to work. And I disagree with that. The Bush tax cuts were always designed to sunset in 2010. And that is because you could not make a realistic budget that assumed their continued existence. Even Bush and a GOP led Congress passed these tax cuts as a short term deal. Anyone who believes that they should be permanent is to the right of Bush on taxes and to the extreme right of historical tax rates and the vast majority of mainstream economic thinking.
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I was reading an article on the budget reconciliation process that challenged this. According to the article anything brought to the floor under the reconciliation rules has to be temporary and the sunset is tied to the length of economic projections. At that point the projections went ten years, so the tax cuts went ten years. The cuts were so large that there was no chance of siphoning off enough votes to get past a filibuster, so reconciliation rules were used.
Instead of crafting a smaller package with more support, the Republicans decided to pass as a large of a bill as they could under the reconciliation process. The hope was that the Republicans would eventually have enough votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and make the cuts permanent. That never happened and now the cuts will expire.
According to this author the reason the cuts have a sunset has to do with political reality and not concern with budget projections.