Senate Republicans Offer Jobs Package
Policy + Politics

Senate Republicans Offer Jobs Package

Senate Republicans on Thursday unveiled a GOP jobs bill designed to offer a conservative vision for improving the economy and counter President Obama’s insistence that congressional Republicans have rejected his ideas for job growth without offering any of their own.

The bill is largely a repackaging of long-stated Republican priorities, and many have also been endorsed by GOP leaders in the House.

But Senate Republicans said it was important to present the ideas in a single package that could compete with President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill, rejected earlier this week by the Senate.

“You have to be for something,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at an afternoon news conference to unveil the legislation.

Republicans have derided Obama’s blueprint as a temporary quick fix that relies on government spending and will do nothing to improve the economy in the long run.

By contrast, they said their package could inject certainty into the economy by limiting the scope of government intervention that they believe stifles growth.

“President Obama and my friends on the other side of the aisle of the Senate believe that they can create jobs through government spending. We believe we can create jobs through growth,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the party’s former presidential nominee who took the lead on presenting the package. “They believe that government spending creates jobs. We believe that business and growth creates jobs.”

Democrats dismissed the effort as a Republican wish list that would do little to actually create jobs even as the potential of a double-dip recession looms.

“It doesn’t sound like a jobs bill,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “It sounds like a Republican theology. . . . It sounds like a rehash.”

The plan, whose sponsors include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and has been embraced by most other GOP senators, would impose a temporary moratorium on new government regulations until the nation’s 9.1 percent unemployment rate drops to 7.7 percent, its level when Obama took office in January 2009.

Even then, any regulation projected to cost businesses $100 million a year would require congressional approval.

The 2009 federal health-care law would be repealed. So, too, would the Dodd-Frank Act imposing new rules on the financial sector after the 2008 economic meltdown.

Congress would initiate a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution, designed to dramatically reduce government spending; the president would receive a line-item veto of future congressional action.

Corporate and individual tax rates would drop from 35 percent to 25 percent. Congressional committees would be instructed to overhaul the tax code within 90 days to eliminate deductions and loopholes, using the new revenue to pay for the tax cut.

Corporations would get a tax break for bringing offshore earnings back to the United States.

And the plan would lift restrictions on offshore drilling.

Republicans insisted that unlike Obama — who has barnstormed the country to pressure Congress to pass his legislation — their proposal was intended to start negotiations with Democrats.

“We consider this a conversation,” Paul said.

But senators said outright that the plan’s goal was to undo the Obama agenda. Asked which pieces of the plan they believed Democrats might be most likely to embrace, they named only its emphasis on tax reform.

Democrats, too, have called for eliminating tax loopholes and subsidies, and some have advocated for lowering the corporate tax rate, which is higher than that of the United States’ foreign competitors.

But most Democrats also believe that the wealthy are paying too little and they endorse tax reform that would include higher taxes on upper-income people, with new revenue put to closing the deficit and funding measures to create jobs.

The Republican proposal comes two days after the Senate blocked a version of Obama’s own $447 billion jobs package devised by Senate leaders that would have paid for the package with a new 5.6 percent tax on millionaires.

Democrats have vowed to break Obama’s plan into pieces and challenge Republicans to reject each one. They are still debating which elements of Obama’s plan to advance first, as they test which pieces of the plan are most acceptable to their own members.

Democrats must also decide whether to first push pieces that are more likely to attract bipartisan votes or that they believe are popular but likely to draw Republican opposition, allowing a sharper contrast between the parties leading into the 2012 election.

Infrastructure spending, for instance, could draw some support from both sides of the aisle.

Obama’s proposal to extend a payroll tax holiday for employees and expand it to include some payroll taxes paid by small businesses could also prove difficult for Republicans to resist, but also has some Democratic opposition.

Other ideas are more likely to draw Republicans’ fire, including once again extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed and aid for state and local governments to avoid further layoffs of teachers and first responders.