Dour Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tanked the new stimulus plan, mistakenly referred to as the “Jobs Bill” by the complicit media, hours after the White House fully endorsed it and apparently because it was just too darned bipartisan.
Objective observers would call it “rank stupidity and incompetence,” but the Daily Caller says it’s a “miscommunication.”
Reid said Thursday afternoon that he would not introduce a bill made public Thursday morning by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, and ranking committee member Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican.
The Democratic leader of the Senate abandoned the bill after hearing complaints from within his own caucus, but only after the White House had already endorsed the Baucus and Grassley bill in the early afternoon.
Before Reid’s about-face, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement saying the president was “gratified” by the release of the bipartisan legislation, saying the bill “includes several of the president’s top priorities for job creation.”
These are the people who want to take over your health care.
The Baucus and Grassley bill had come under some criticism immediately upon its release for including $66 billion in “extenders”: the extension of unemployment benefits, expiring tax provisions, and payments to medical providers under Medicare.
Much of the opposition came from within the Democratic caucus.
Hmmm…Some Democrats like it and some don’t. Some Republicans like it and some don’t. Sounds like the kind of bipartisanship we’ve been promised. What could have gone wrong?
Grassley spokeswoman Jill Kozeny said that Reid had spiked the bipartisan bill “just as Republican senators were saying they liked things in the Baucus-Grassley draft.”
“Senator Reid’s announcement sends a message that he wants to go partisan and blame Republicans when Senator Grassley and others were trying to find common ground on solutions to help get the economy back on track and people back to work,” Kozeny said. “The majority leader pulled the rug out from work to build broad-based support for tax relief and other efforts to help the private sector recover from the economic crisis.”
As for the provisions in the new bill, they sound about as clear as mud and unlikely to spur any economic growth. To me, it sounds like they’re hoping the economy will turn around anyway and just want to have some piece of crap bill out there they can point to as the cause when it does.
- Jobs Payroll Tax Exemption: offers an exemption from social security payroll taxes for every worker hired in 2010 that has been unemployed for at least 60 days. There would be an additional $1,000 income tax credit for every new employee retained for 52 weeks to be taken on the employer’s 2011 income tax return ($13 billion over 10 years).
- Section 179 Expensing: helps small businesses grow by allowing them to write off more expenditures ($35 million over 10 years).
- Highway Trust Fund Extension: extends existing highway programs which provide states and localities with the certainty they need to make decisions on projects. It allows for billions more to be invested in infrastructure throughout the nation and saves one million jobs.
- Expanding Build America Bonds: allows state and local governments to borrow at lower costs to finance more infrastructure projects and put people to work ($2 billion over 10 years).
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