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Heritage
Network...
Morning
Bell: Senate Votes to Raise Taxes on Small Businesses
by Amy
Payne
July 26,
2012
Yesterday,
the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small
businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time
when nearly
13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and
Jim
Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax
hike.
This is
President Obama’s economic plan. This is what he asked Congress to do.
And he
recently told a fundraising crowd that his economic plan has been
working.
“Just like
we’ve tried [Republicans’] plan, we tried our plan—and it worked,” he
said.
But Obama’s
Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said yesterday that “the economy
is not
growing fast enough,” acknowledging that “unemployment is very high.”
“The
institutions with authority should be doing everything they can to try
to make
economic growth stronger,” he said.
The
President’s plan, now endorsed by the Democratic majority in the
Senate, has
little chance of going anywhere in the House of Representatives. But it
has put
the 51 Senators who want to raise taxes on record.
Perhaps the
biggest lie in the tax debate is that this vote affects only “the
rich.” That’s
simply not true. Many small businesses, known as flow-through
businesses, pay
their taxes through the individual income tax. Ernst and Young
estimates that
these types of businesses “employ 54% of the private sector work
force.” This
tax hike squarely hits 1.2 million of these businesses that hire
workers and
have incomes above $200,000.
Rather than
punishing just “the rich,” as Heritage’s Curtis Dubay notes, “By
pinpointing
his tax increase on incomes over $200,000, President Obama has
maximized the
detrimental impact that his tax increase would have on job creation.”
The Ernst
and Young study on the impact of this tax hike showed that it could
kill more
than 700,000 jobs. This isn’t surprising, since the businesses it
targets are
some of the country’s most robust job creators. But it is surprising
that a
majority of the Senate would go along with this plan when the country
is
suffering from 8.2 percent unemployment.
As if that
weren’t enough, the Senate’s actions would also raise the death tax
from 35
percent to 55 percent. This confiscatory rate would hit small
businesses and
family farms exceptionally hard...
Read the
rest of this article at The Heritage Network
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