The Senate resumed consideration of H.R. 2832, the Generalized System of Preferences Act, a trade promotion bill that will be the vehicle for renewing Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). They will began voting on amendments to the bill from Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John McCain (R-AZ). The Hatch amendment would keep TAA renewal from happening until the 3 pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama are passed. The McCain amendment would authorize TAA for two years, but only at reduced 2002 funding levels.
Yesterday, the Senate voted 45-55 against an amendment from Sen. McConnell, which would have restored Trade Promotion Authority, often called “fast track,” which has allowed beneficial free trade agreements to be negotiated in the past. Democrats allowed it to lapse and with this vote have now shown they won’t even give the authority to easily negotiate new trade agreements to a president of their own party.
Also yesterday, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm Timothy Cain as a district judge for South Carolina.
Today, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee will attempt to pass out of committee a mandatory workplace verification bill to finally stop illegal aliens from holding payroll jobs. The Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2885) is the most powerful bill ever considered by congressional committee in terms of stopping employment of illegal aliens in payroll jobs.
President Obama’s tax hike plan is generating more opposition by the day, and remarkably, an awful lot of it seems to be coming from Democrats.
As The Wall Street Journal editors write today, “[T]he bigger news may be how much resistance Mr. Obama’s ideas are drawing from the Democrats who control the Senate. Senators from energy-producing states object to targeting oil and gas companies. ‘Just picking out one industry is not acceptable,’ said Alaska’s Mark Begich. Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu added: ‘That offset is not going to fly, and [Mr. Obama] should know that.’ Even New York’s Chuck Schumer, of all unlikely partisans, has objections—notably to Mr. Obama’s plan to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire on taxpayers earning more than $200,000 (or $250,000 for married couples): ‘$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi, but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York, and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay.’”
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) bluntly said, “This plan isn’t the one I would have written, nor is it the one that will end up passing Congress.” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) who will face a hotly contested election in Florida told Politico, “There’s too much discussion about raising taxes right now, not enough focus on cutting spending.”
And Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) said on Sean Hannity’s radio show, “I wouldn’t do anything to raise taxes in the foreseeable future because that’ll stifle the recovery.”
Even former President Bill Clinton agrees. According to Politico, “Former President Bill Clinton says now is not the time to hike taxes. ‘I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending, either one, until we get this economy off the ground,’ Clinton told Newsmax in an interview on Tuesday. ‘This has been a dead flat economy.’”
Meanwhile, job creators are similarly unenthusiastic about President Obama’s plans to raise taxes. The National Federation of Independent Business, a key advocate for small businesses said, “New tax increases on America’s biggest job creators are the last thing this economy needs to get back on track. . . . With small businesses still struggling to recover and grow, this plan sends a bad message to job creators.” National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) President and CEO Jay Timmons said, “President Obama’s call for tax increases on small businesses, individuals and investors is a poison pill for our economy. The bottom line is that manufacturers need policies that enable them to hire more workers, make capital investments and expand their businesses. More than 70% of manufacturers operate as S-corporations and pay income tax at the individual rate, so higher taxes on these job creators would be a devastating blow.”
Caroline Harris, chief tax counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told the The Fiscal Times, “Targeting proven job creators is not the way to drive job or economic growth….It kills the very economic growth we need to truly get out of this situation.” And John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable, added, “The uncertainty created by the threat of even higher taxes helps neither job creation nor growth.”
As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said on the floor this morning, “If we could solve our jobs crisis and revive the economy by passing around a hat at Warren Buffet’s annual shareholders meeting, then we’d have done it by now. But we can’t. The President said the other day that the tax hikes he’s proposing aren’t class warfare. They’re math. Well, we can do math too. According to the IRS, if you doubled the tax burden on everybody in America who earned more than a million dollars in 2009, you’d cover the cost of about three months of deficit spending around here. And if you confiscated every dime of taxable income from those the President refers to as millionaires and billionaires, you wouldn’t even cover a single year of deficit spending in Washington right now. Sending more money to Washington won’t solve our spending problem — it will enable it. [H]ere is the most important calculation: not a single new job will come about as a result of the tax hikes the President proposed this week. . . . What else do you need to know?”
Tags: Barack Obama, taxes, increase spending, Democrats, Bill Clinton, E-verfy, illegal alines, US Senate, US House, Washington, D.C. To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
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