House may tack on tax cuts

[Freddie Stubbs]

The Associated Press


WASHINGTON — House tax writers will consider more than $1.5 billion in small business tax cuts next week in hopes of freeing minimum wage legislation currently stuck in an impasse between the House and Senate.

Despite being less than one-fourth the size of what the Senate passed last week, it sets the stage for negotiations that could result in the first increase in the minimum wage in a decade. The legislation would raise the wage floor by $2.10 over two years to $7.25 an hour.

The House proposal has the bipartisan backing of Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and the panel's ranking Republican, Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana. The committee is expected to consider the proposal Monday. The legislation would then go to the House floor later in the week.

Senate Democrats had been signaling to the House that a tax cut package was the only way to guarantee needed Republican support for the bill in the Senate. With 49 members in the 100-member Senate, Republicans can easily use procedural tactics to delay or kill legislation unless Democrats can line up 60 votes to hold a vote on a bill.

more: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070210/BIZ/702100352/1005

[MissMillie]

1. I'm ok w/ small business tax cuts

as long as the big cuts to big oil and multi-millionaires are allowed to expire.

[HappyWeasel]

2. yeah. Even there is a difference between a small middleclass businessman

with 2 million dollars of revenue and 60,000 in profit a year than a big business man that has 100 million dollars in revenue and 3 million in profit each year and then there is a difference between them and those who have 5 billion dollars in revenue a year and 150 million dollars in profits. Don't let anyone fool you. Any business that has a profit rate higher than the growth rate of the population is doing just fine (about 1%).

[Robbien]

11. Who do you believe qualifies as small business?

Multimillionaires, billionaires qualify as small buinesses. That is why this tax cut is being pushed.

Very little of this tax cut will trickle down to the middle class.

[jwirr]

3. As long as they are for small business and middleclass I am for them.

[Warpy]

4. REAL small business tax cuts are needed

and by that I mean mom & pop stores, motels, restaurants, dry cleaners, and all the other small business amenities we proles rely on.

What I DON'T mean is tying them to the number of employees so that real estate barons can't get the bulk of the cuts like they have in the past. They need to tie them to yearly gross.

I use the real estate barons as an example because I've actually run into that one. A local SBA office in New England that was supposed to lend small businesses capital for expansion lent the lot to a real estate developer with a very small staff and a zillion sub contractors year after year. Real small businesses were cut out. They all cried foul, but the developer was politically connected and nothing was done. Never mind his yearly gross was approaching half a billion. The money was there and he got every dime.

The SBA has been abused for years. Congress needs to pass these tax cuts, but make sure that they really are targeted to the businesses that need them the most, not to outfits with few employees and more profit than they know what to do with.

[Taoschick]

7. Part of the problem with the

Small business tax cuts has to do with the fact that many of them aren't claimed because the owner doesn't want to spend more on an accountant than he will recover in tax savings. Who wants to spend a thousand dollars to "recover" $250-$300?

[Warpy]

9. Most small business owners I know

do their own taxes using various computer programs out there. You're right that they can't afford accountants.

[MidwestTransplant]

5. FYI a "small business" is one that has

[crikkett]

6. ...well?

[MidwestTransplant]

10. HA. Oops. It has less than 500 employees so they aren't all very small

[w4rma]

8. Rewrite the "small" business tax cuts to be small business tax cuts.

And keeping them 1/4 of the size of the Senate version is good.

Republicans won't be able to hold together their filibuster if there are true tax cuts for true small businesses even if they are 1/4 the size that they wanted for their "small" business subsidiaries of big businesses.

In other words, give the Republicans what they **SAY** they want, not what they **really** want.

Only give the Rethugs what they can talk openly about with their constituents. Not what they really want, which are laws, for the people who those lobbyists work for, to get richer quicker off of.