President Barack Obama’s latest round of spending ideas and tax breaks isn’t garnering support from two Idaho Republicans in Congress.
Obama proposed spending $50 billion on roads, trains, and airports and increasing tax incentives for businesses to spend on capital investments as well as research and development projects.
Rep. Mike Simpson and Sen. Jim Risch are opposed to the extra transportation spending, though Risch said the business tax credits have some merit.
Risch’s spokesman, Brad Hoaglun, said Risch wouldn’t back the new money for transportation projects. “To spend $50 billion that we don’t have is a non-starter for him,” Hoaglun told IdahoReporter.com.
However, Hoaglun said the tax breaks for businesses, separated from the spending, could easily pass the Senate. “That’d be a good way to get the private sector to start creating the jobs, as opposed to borrowing the money and dumping it into the economy.”
Obama’s proposal would make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent and increase it from 14 percent to 17 percent. He also wants certain capital investments, which could apply to construction projects and other spending, to be fully tax deductible until the end of 2011.
Simpson said that House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio has better ideas for fixing the sluggish economy. “John Boehner said it well when he challenged the President to heed the advice of his own budget director to not increase taxes,” Simpson said in a prepared statement. “I am not entirely sure why the President continues to believe that increased spending and increased taxes are an appropriate path forward when the American people clearly believe they are not.”
Boehner and other Republicans are offering a “two-point policy” of reducing non-security federal spending to levels from 2008, and freezing all tax rates for two years. House Republicans have said not freezing taxes would kill job creation.
A White House official called Boehner’s tax policy irresponsible and said it would provide the most benefit to millionaires and billionaires.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, representing business interests, opposes the tax incentives for businesses. “This doesn’t quite live up to the White House hype,” the Chamber’s Pat Clearly wrote on the ChamberPost blog. “Taken together, they are of dubious job-creating value, but worse yet, the ultimate burden to business – tax and otherwise – will far exceed any benefit they may bring.”
Representatives for Sen. Mike Crapo and Rep. Walt Minnick said each will need more time to study Obama’s proposals before commenting on their merits.
Photo courtesy of the White House/Chuck Kennedy
I guess I don’t understand the $50 billion being spent on transportation construction. Once you are finish the constructions jobs are gone. Though we don’t have money to spend, but if the president insists on spending $50 billion how about spending it on a power plant which sustains jobs and provides power to communities which could decrease power costs.
[...] Crapo added that the money for transportation projects would need to be paid for. Like Sen. Jim Risch and Rep. Mike Simpson, he said it could be better not to spend federal [...]