President Barack Obama is “in over his head” when it comes to tackling the country’s economic troubles, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Wednesday.
The president has not run a business or created jobs and has proven himself ill-suited to put the economy back on track, the Virginia Republican said in a midday interview on The Wall Street Journal’s website with opinion columnist Peggy Noonan and editor James Freeman.
President Barack Obama is “in over his head” when it comes to tackling the country’s economic troubles, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Wednesday.
The president has not run a business or created jobs and has proven himself ill-suited to put the economy back on track, the Virginia Republican said in a midday interview on The Wall Street Journal’s website with opinion columnist Peggy Noonan and editor James Freeman.
When picking someone to run an economy, don’t pick the person who has scored high marks for agreeing with professors in university classrooms. Agreeing with professors does not give a person experience of how the world really works. Instead, choose someone who has practical experience at running a business and creating jobs. Academic parroting is no substitute for running a successful private sector business. Herman Cain would be a better choice for President than Barack Obama, if the main criterion was job creation.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”
The administration’s plan to raise the tax rate on small businesses is part of its plan to raise taxes on all Americans who make more than $250,000 per year—including businesses that file taxes the same way individuals and families do.
Geithner’s explanation of the administration’s small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009.
“Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.”
[…]When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”—including federal education spending.
So what about the Republicans in the House? Are they going to cave in to the Democrat demands for more taxes on job creators?
Two days after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) dodged the question of whether Republicans would insist that any increase in the debt limit in this fiscal year would be exceeded by spending cuts in this fiscal year, the congressman walked out of debt/budget talks with Vice President Joe Biden, stating he could not continue as long as the Democrats insisted that taxes be raised as part of a budget deal.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), meanwhile, maintained that tax increases were off the table and that spending cuts should exceed any increase in the federal debt limit.
“Each side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases,” said Cantor in a statement released on Thursday. “[T]he tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue. Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting.”
Both Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have consistently said that any budget deal for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 and a vote on raising the debt limit–from $14.29 trillion to potentially $16.79 trillion (a $2.5 trillion increase)–would not include raising taxes.
After Cantor left the talks with Biden, along with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Boehner held a press conference and said, “Listen, we’ve got to stop spending money that we don’t have and, since the beginning, the Majority Leader [Canotor] and myself, along with Sen. McConnell and Sen. Kyl have been clear: tax hikes are off the table.”
“First of all: raising taxes is going to destroy jobs,” said Boehner. “If you raise taxes on the people that we need to grow our economy and to hire new workers, guess what? They’re not going to do it if they have to pay higher taxes to the federal government.”
“Second, a tax hike cannot pass the U.S. House of Representatives,” said the Speaker. “It’s not just a bad idea, it doesn’t have the votes and it can’t happen. And third, the American people don’t want us to raise taxes. They know that we’ve got a spending problem. That’s why Republicans passed a budget [drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin] that pays down debt over time without raising taxes.”
But what about the Republicans in the Senate? Aren’t they usually more liberal than the Republicans in the House?
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told CNSNews.com that he would “absolutely not” support any tax increases as part of a deal to increase the debt limit.
Lee was asked if he agreed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that revenue increases should be part of a negotiation on the debt limit because spending cuts alone are “irresponsible.”
“I’m fine with revenue increases as long as they don’t involve tax increases. There are other ways of increasing revenue. They could expand their use of federal public land through extension of oil and gas leases and so forth. If they want that kind of revenue increase, I’m all for that,” said Lee after endorsing the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” during a press conference at the Capitol on Wednesday.
Politicians who support the pledge vow to vote against raising the debt limit unless Congress adopts a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution and implements budget cuts and caps on federal spending.
Lee was then asked if he would support any tax increases, specifically.
“No. Absolutely not. We can’t afford a double dip recession right now, and that’s exactly where that would take us,” said Lee.
“You take the same people whose investment dollars are needed to create jobs and you penalize them and you tell them you’re going to get to keep less of your, the rewards from your investment than you would otherwise take – that’s going to chill rather than promote investment. And if you do that, we’re going to have fewer jobs rather than more at a time when we can least afford to hemorrhage jobs.”
House and Senate Republicans understand that we need jobs, and that raising taxes will hurt job creation. Obama’s answer to everything is always more taxing and more spending and more borrowing. The Republicans have got to hold firm and take away his credit card. We need an intervention.
Earlier this month, LifeNews.com reported on a public vote House Republicans were taking, seeing input from American voters on which one of three ideas for saving taxpayer dollars was the most attractive and should become the next bill pushed in Congress. With thousands of pro-life advocates encouraged to vote, legislation cutting UNFPA funding won out and will now become the next piece of legislation Republicans will advance.
The vote at the popular YouCut web site makes it so the public will be able to track the progressof the legislation as it moves through the legislative process.
Rep. Renee Ellmers, of North Carolina, will be introducing legislation soon.
“This is going to save American taxpayers $400 million dollars over a 10 year period and it’s just another part of what we’re doing here in Washington to cut wasteful spending that we see happening,” she said in a new video introducing the bill. “And I am very excited to be part of this program and each week we will have more cuts coming forward.”
The legislation would result in cutting the funding President Barack Obama put in place for the UNFPA, an agency that promotes abortion and works hand-in-hand with family planning officials in China enforcing the one-child, forced-abortion policy.
[…]Steve Mosher, the head of the Population Research Institute and the leading campaigner exposing China and the one-child policy, says the UNFPA is the UN population control agency that is complicit in China’s brutal one-child policy, which is carried out through a program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization. He hopes the YouCut program receives enough votes to move the pro-life bill forward.
“With just a click of your mouse, you can cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund,’ he said in an email to LifeNews. “Defunding UNFPA could be considered by the House soon, but only if this option gets the most votes on the YouCut website. That’s where you come in. If you think the United States House of Representatives should cut funding to the UNFPA, then vote for that option on the YouCut web site, and urge everyone you know to do the same.”
Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek also encouraged people to vote in it.
“How many times have you been forwarded an email to vote on a meaningless opinion poll?” she asked. “Well, for once, here’s a poll that can really save the lives of preborn children. If you have friends who are solely fiscal conservatives, tell them that at $400 million, this choice will save taxpayers the most money of any of this week’s 3 options.
The YouCut web site talks about the history of UNFPA funding.
“In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan withheld all U.S. contributions to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) after determining that UNFPA participated in the support and co-management of China’s population control program,” it explains. “Under the Bush administration, the U.S. withheld funds for the UNFPA from America’s annual contributions to the United Nations due to UNFPA’s complicity in China’s one-child policy enforced through coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization, but the Obama administration and the 111th Congress resumed contributions to UNFPA.”
The budget House Republicans wanted sought to terminate UNFPA funding, which stood at $55 million in FY 2010. UNFPA funding was cut by $15 million, to $40 million in the final agreement over FY 2011 spending, but the remainder is sent to the pro-abortion agency.
After Obama restored the funding, Rep. Chris Smith tried to offer an amendment to revert the language back to the original ban on such funding, but House Democrats blocked him from doing so. Then, pro-life Sen. Roger Wicker offered a similar amendment but the Senate defeated it.
Republicans are opposed to funding coerced and sex-selection abortions in China. If Republicans can cut off the money to the United Nations, then maybe the coerced and sex-selection abortions in China will decrease. Regardless of that, we taxpayers can certainly use the money better on our own projects than the government of China can. For example, if I get my money back from the United Nations, I could give it to a crisis pregnancy center. Let me decide – it’s my money. I earned it.
WINTERY KNIGHT 