Tag Archives: John Boehner

John Boehner says no to Obama’s plan to raise taxes by 2 trillion

Republican Speaker John Boehner
Republican House Speaker John Boehner

From the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Senate Democrats have drafted a sweeping debt-reduction plan that would slice $4 trillion from projected borrowing over the next decade without touching the expensive health and retirement programs targeted by President Obama.

Instead, Senate Democrats are proposing to stabilize borrowing through sharp cuts at the Pentagon and other government agencies, as well as $2 trillion in new taxes…

[…]Republicans dismissed the Democratic blueprint, saying higher taxes would be devastating to an economy already weighed down by a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. In their spending plan, House Republicans proposed to save $4 trillion entirely through spending cuts; they would also eliminate Medicare as an open-ended entitlement after 2021.

“If they’re calling for $2 trillion in tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis, it’s little wonder that it’s been 800 days since Senate Democrats passed a budget,” said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart.

Since early this year, Senate Democrats have struggled to draft a spending plan. Moderates refused to endorse any blueprint that included big annual budget deficits or big tax hikes. Liberals, meanwhile, opposed sharp cuts to social programs. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the senior Budget Committee Republican, has relentlessly hammered Democrats for their failure to adopt a budget.

Although the new document is unlikely to be officially adopted, it was embraced by a majority of Senate Democrats when Conrad presented it at a closed-door luncheon earlier this week, aides said.

Under the blueprint, the top income tax rate would rise to 39.6 percent for individuals earning more than $500,000 a year and families earning more than $1 million. That group, which constitutes the nation’s richest 1 percent of households, would also pay a 20 percent rate on capital gains and dividends, rather than the 15 percent rate now in effect.

John Boehner says no way.

Excerpt:

Speaker John A. Boehner told President Obama on Saturday night he will not agree to the president’s most ambitious plan for deficit reduction, citing the administration’s pursuit of tax increases as one of the main hurdles.

The Democrats want to tax investors and job creators. Is it any wonder that this administration has been unable to create jobs? They keep taxing and regulating the small businesses and investors who enable the creation of the majority of new private sector jobs, then are shocked to find that no new jobs are being created. When will they learn that “taxing the rich” just means “taxing the job creators”?

Why are companies not hiring?

Companies are not hiring because the Democrats spent too much, and now they want to raise taxes. Higher taxes makes companies not hire workers.

Look at this diagram:

Republican control of House = low unemployment

Compare the unemployment rates when Republican Newt Gingrich was in charge of the House, to when Nancy Pelosi was in charge:

Gingrich versus Pelosi unemployment graph
Unemployment: Gingrich ('95-'99) vs Pelosi ('07-'10)

Nancy Pelosi added 5.34 trillion to the national debt in 4 years! If you are running a business, then you STOP hiring when you see that the government is spending so much that new taxes are inevitable. You cannot argue with these facts – more spending means higher unemployment, BECAUSE more spending raises fears of higher taxes on job creators. And that’s exactly what Obama is now threatening, and why the unemployment rate is going UP not DOWN. Newt Gingrich added only ONE TRILLION to the national debt between 1994 and 1999. ONE TRILLION. That’s bad, but it’s not FIVE TRILLION as under Pelosi.

Prior to January 2007, George W. Bush’s unemployment rate was down below 5%. Job creators knew that he wasn’t going to come after them with tax hikes and burdensome regulations. You can’t create jobs by punishing job creators. The trade-off of low tax rates for the wealthy is a low unemployment rate. Those are the facts, and we have to live with reality as it is.

Republicans rebuff Obama’s call to raise taxes on small business

First, an article explaining how the Obama administration wants to raise taxes on small businesses.

Excerpt:

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?

CNS News reports that House Republicans categorically refuse to raise taxes during a recession.

Excerpt:

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?

CNS News reports that Republicans in the Senate are absolutely opposed to increasing taxes in a recession.

Excerpt:

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.

Republicans hire top lawyer to defend traditional marriage against Democrats

This is from liberal CNN. (H/T Reuben)

Excerpt:

House Republicans have hired a prominent conservative attorney to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a pending lawsuit, legal sources say, and will make an effort to divert money from the Justice Department to fund its high-profile fight.

House Speaker John Boehner disclosed the legal and political strategy in a letter Monday to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The Obama administration, which normally would defend federal laws in judicial disputes, announced last month it believed the Defense of Marriage Act, often referred to as DOMA, to be unconstitutional. The law defines marriage for federal purposes as unions only between a man and woman.

Boehner said that with the Justice Department not participating, he had “no choice” but to act unilaterally.

“The burden of defending DOMA, and the resulting costs associated with any litigation that would have otherwise been born (sic) by DOJ (The Department of Justice), has fallen to the House,” Boehner said. “Obviously, DOJ’s decision results in DOJ no longer needing the funds it would have otherwise expended defending the constitutionality of DOMA. It is my intent that those funds be diverted to the House for reimbursement of any costs incurred by and associated with the House, and not DOJ, defending DOMA.”

Such a move would require Senate approval, an unlikely prospect since Democrats control that chamber.

Boehner will probably end up finding money for the legal fight from other discretionary and non-discretionary spending sources, according to legal experts. There was no indication just how much the legal fight could eventually cost.

[…]Legal sources say the House Republican leadership hired [Paul D.] Clement, a Washington appellate attorney, to defend the law. He filed a brief Monday in a pending case from New York, where a lesbian received an estate tax bill of more than $360,000 after her longtime partner and legal wife had died.Clement is a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, serving from 2005 to 2008. It was his job to defend federal laws and executive actions in court, similar to what he will be doing now as a private lawyer on retainer. He was mentioned at one time as a possible Supreme Court nominee.

Separately, he also is representing more than two dozens states in their lawsuit against the administration over the sweeping health care reform law passed by Congress last year. That case is pending in a federal appeals court in Atlanta.

Once again we see the importance of conservative parents raising influential children. Everybody talks about traditional marriage, but only Paul D. Clement is going to be in a position to really do something about it. And why? Because he has effectively pursued skills and jobs that put him in a position to have an influence.