Ezra Klein: The Senate Finance Committee's Jobs Bill (Massive tax cuts for the rich)

[flpoljunkie]

(Emphasis mine.)

The Senate Finance Committee's jobs bill

The Senate Finance Committee has released a draft (pdf) of its jobs bill, called the HIRE Act. If you've been following along, that might sound strange to you: Wasn't the jobs bill coming from Byron Dorgan and Dick Durbin? Well, yes, but the Finance Committee wants control of the process, so it's trying to muscle its way in front of them. And look how they did it:

While not addressed in the proposals in this package, there are two process agreements that are essential to completing action on it. Fulfilling these agreements has been a condition precedent to the bipartisan discussions that have occurred. First we will work to ensure that the scope of the Finance Committee package retains its bipartisan character. Second we are committed to timely consideration of permanent bipartisan estate and gift tax reform.

In other words, in order to get Republic cooperation on an $80 billion jobs bill, Democrats have promised them estate and gift tax reform, which will come to many hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the compromise that appears to have led to this package: not a better or bigger or more tax-focused jobs bill, but massive tax cuts for the rich.

Tell me again why Democrats are bothering with a bipartisan jobs bill rather than running the legislation through reconciliation?

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/the_senate_finance_committees.html

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. What I don't understand is why anyone might still be surprised at this point. nt

[inna]

7. I'm not necessarily surprised, but this makes me want to bang my head on the wall.

This is just unilateral class warfare in action.

:banghead:

[cilla4progress]

8. I'm halfway through honorable Mr. Zinn's tome

right now - completing it in honor of his passing, after beginning it many years ago. Though lengthy, it does move along well!

[Hello_Kitty]

2. FUCK!!

And extending the Bush tax cuts to the rich is next.

:banghead:

[BeyondGeography]

3. Baucus is a hollowed out shell of a man

Kind of what an inflatable corrupt burnout doll would look like.

[inna]

9. He'll do the same here that he did to the Health Care legislation.

In other words, fuck it up beyond all recognition.

It's almost like deliberate sabotage. He's as bad as any Republican.

[Captain Hilts]

12. The president seemed okay with Baucus's handling of HCR. I'm still stunned by that. nt

[DrToast]

4. Now we know why the Finance committee rushed to get in front of this

[high density]

5. How does cutting the estate tax grow jobs?

We know tax cuts don't work already as a job creation tool.

[frazzled]

6. I got freaked at this too ...

But then I looked at the language more closely. This stuff isn't in their draft bill (for which Klein added the pdf). It says that that they agreed to "timely consideration of .... estate and gift tax reform."

Could this just mean they've agreed to entertain amendments on the subject? But these could be voted down. It doesn't really say they've agreed to put them in the jobs bill. Only that they agreed to allow discussion on this topic to be considered.

Am I just being too hopeful?

[flpoljunkie]

13. Ten Dems voted for Kyl/Lincoln amendment last April to 'slash estate taxes for multi-millionaires.'

(Luckily, there was no companion bill in the House.)

Ten Democrats vote for Sens. Kyl and Lincoln’s bill protecting the children of multimillionaires.

Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) recently introduced a $250 billion amendment to slash estate taxes for the heirs of multimillion-dollar estates. Yesterday, the Senate narrowly passed the bill by a 51-48 vote. Joining Republicans in approving the bill were ten Senate Democrats:

Baucus (D-MT), Bayh (D-IN), Cantwell (D-WA), Landrieu (D-LA), Lincoln (D-AR), Murray (D-WA), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Tester (D-MT)

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/03/estate-tax-lincoln-democrats

Link to Senate roll call vote on the amendment: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00146

[frazzled]

15. Yeah, but that was a bullshit fake bill, and it didn't cut estate taxes

Also from Ezra Klein (who began the discussion here):

Towards the end of last week, Blanche Lincoln and Jon Kyl got a lot of attention for their proposal to lower the estate tax and save the wealthiest 0.28 percent of estate owners about $440 billion over 10 years. Think Progress and others angrily noted the amendment's victory. "The Senate narrowly passed the bill by a 51-48 vote," sighed Satyam Khanna.

Well, sort of. The Senate narrowly passed something called the "Deficit Neutral Reserve Fund for Estate Tax Relief." This did not reform the estate tax. Rather, it reserved the right to reform the estate tax at some later date. It's a budget gimmick, not a bill.

{...] A deficit-neutral reserve fund reserves your right to lift spending or lower your revenue floor in a way that doesn't harm the deficit.

That's what Kyl and Lincoln passed. If they can find hundreds of billions to fund a cut in the estate tax, they can then hold a vote to cut the estate tax. If they can't, they can't. More interesting, they have essentially admitted that they will need to fund it through cuts to entitlements. As Jim Horney, a budget expert at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to me, "if you pay for a tax cut with another tax increase you haven't reduced revenues in net and you don't need a deficit-neutral reserve fund." To pass the estate tax reform, in other words, they'd have to cut hundreds of billions in spending from currently existing programs. Unless they're planning to chop apart the Pentagon, that means cutting entitlements. That means this isn't happening.

This was, in other words, a cost-free vote. Deficit-neutral reserve funds also serve a non-budgetary purpose: They allow you to insert a priority in the budget without actually passing or paying for it. Blanche Lincoln can now go to her constituents and explain that she built estate tax relief into the budget. That's true even as no one actually experiences any estate tax relief and the Senate does nothing to actually fund the policy. This proposal, in other words, was evidence that Blanche Lincoln, Jon Kyl, and 49 of their colleagues thought it extremely important to be on record supporting a $440 billion tax cut for the wealthy, not that they're actually going to pass the tax cut.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2009&base_name=there_is_no_estate_tax_reform

[gkhouston]

10. Meh. The Republicans will play their usual bait-and-switch and *still* not vote

for the jobs bill. The Administration is going to have to find a way to circumvent or break the filibuster if it wants to get anything done in the Senate.

[Captain Hilts]

11. Don't give in to the House of Lords. nt

[TheKentuckian]

14. Another day, another rush to capitulate to the whims of the wealthy

Fucking chumps. They've already made it into a turdpile by sneaking in an extension of the unconstitutional Patriot Act in there.

Their "help" seems less and less desirable by the day, they'll be giving up the minimum wage and privatizing every service by the end of this bullshit term.

[jenmito]

16. If they keep Bush's tax cuts for the rich, I hope Obama vetoes it. n/t

[inna]

17. In your (and my) dreams.