With just two months until the November elections, the White House is seriously weighing a package of business tax breaks - potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars - to spur hiring and combat Republican charges that Democratic tax policies hurt small businesses, according to people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Among the options under consideration are a temporary payroll-tax holiday and a permanent extension of the now-expired research-and-development tax credit, which rewards companies that conduct research into new technologies within the United States.
Administration officials have struggled to develop new economic policies and an effective message to blunt expected Republican gains in Congress and defuse complaints from Democrats that President Obama is fumbling the issue most important to voters. Following Obama's vacation and focus on foreign policy in recent weeks, White House advisers have arranged a series of economic events for the president next week, including two trips to swing states and a news conference.
"We'll continue to do everything we can, understanding that recovery will require persistent effort. There are no silver bullets," senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said in an interview Thursday. "At the same time, we have to make clear our ideas and theirs, and the fact that the Washington Republicans, having helped create this recession, have attempted to block our every effort to deal with it."
And they will continue to do so. From the very beginning, the Administration has implemented economic policy designed to try to ward off Republican criticism (which comes anyway) and which relies on Republican arguments that if you just shovel enough cash into the pockets of already ridiculously wealthy corporate executives, that they will share it by hiring people. What on earth makes them think this? Certainly not the world of reality:
Anyone wondering where all the economy's jobs are might want to look into piggy banks of the world's biggest companies.
Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be the third-consecutive quarter of sharp earnings increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money and stuffing it under their corporate mattresses.
Non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have a record $837 billion in cash, S&P says. That's enough to pay 2.4 million people $70,000-a-year salaries for five years. For context, 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs were saved or created by the $862 billion stimulus that President Obama signed into law in February 2009, according to a report released in April from the Council of Economic Advisers.
Rather than investing in their future, companies are piling up cash and collecting practically zero interest on the money, hoping there will be a better time to invest later.
Barack Obama could come up with a plan to cut business taxes to zero, eliminate the Department of Education, the FDA, the EPA, and every other government agency that Republicans say "stifles business", and they would STILL call him a socialist communist Muslim terrorist. For nearly two years we have seen an Administration completely in thrall to Wall Street in the form of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, to the worst elements of the Republican Party, and to ConservoDems who care more about keeping their government paycheck than about doing what's right. The tragedy is that he's going to pay a heavy price for selling out the middle class this November, and the even worse tragedy is that he's going to respond by shoveling even MORE cash into the pockets of already rich corporate executives.
The slogan of the Democratic Party and this president this season is "We suck but they're crazy." Sorry, but that just won't cut it. Perhaps it's time to just sit back, figure we had a good, if too-short run, grab the popcorn, and watch as it all falls apart. Because there is no one in power who will stop it.
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