John Boehner gave a speech to the City Club in Cleveland and and started to outline a conservative economic agenda. Via Kudlow:
Near the top he said, “Right now, America’s employers are afraid to invest in an economy stalled by ‘stimulus’ spending and hamstrung by uncertainty. The prospect of higher taxes, stricter rules, and more regulations has employers sitting on their hands.”
His first proposal to break that uncertainty? Boehner said, “President Obama should announce he will not carry out his plan to impose job-killing tax hikes on families and small businesses.” In other words, extend all the Bush tax cuts. To this end, Boehner quoted former President John F. Kennedy: “An economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs.”
And Boehner was just getting started.
He called for an Obama pledge to veto any lame-duck congressional actions that would damage the economy, including the union card-check bill and a national cap-and-trade energy tax.
He called for the repeal of Obamacare’s job-killing 1099 mandate that would require small-business paperwork to show any purchases of more than $600.
He slammed Obamacare in general, noting the creation of more than 160 boards, bureaucracies, programs, and commissions, and the 3,833 pages of new regulations already in place.
He called for an aggressive spending-reduction package that would rollback non-defense discretionary expenditures to 2008 levels, before the stimulus plan was put in place.
He said he wants to end TARP and all TARP bailouts.
He bemoaned the fact that no one in the White House has any business experience, chiding Obama by saying, “We’ve tried 19 months of government-as-community-organizer. It hasn’t worked. Our fresh start needs to begin now.”
This is a good starting point… However I would like to see a new ‘contract with America.’
The republicans need to keep hammering the message home. They need to remind Americans of the failed policies of this administration. We must repeal ObamaCare and the Financial Reform law. These two laws are destructive and have transformed the Republic into something that is not the Republic of our Grandparents. Think about this, if the economy really turns south, the government now has the power through provisions in the financial reform law to legally (Unconstitutionally) takeover massive sectors of our free market by infringing on private property rights. This is scary! Maybe this was the plan all along and why he appears to be unwilling to do anything positive to get our economy back on the right path.
Great points John.
The finical reform bill doesn’t get the play that ObamaCare does but it is every bit as corrosive to our freedom.
I think John Boehner is onto something. I just hope we can gain enough seats in November to get a start of making it happen.
He (Boehner) is correct that business is, for the most part, sitting on the sidelines waiting to see what is in store for them in the new hope and change fueled economy.
I can confirm that by the actions of my own employer. He is worried about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and about the affects of the health care reforms that are upcoming. I have a commenter or my blog who says she is a small business owner and knows a lot of other small business owners. She holds the opinion that they are not letting fear drive their business decisions and are not worrying about what will happen in three years when the reforms are set to go into affect. That is certainly not the case with my employer, as his accountant has told him his overall tax liability will go up about $8,000 per year if the tax cuts expire. I am afraid a lot of people are in for a rude awakening when this all starts going down.
@LD: Not only the will the tax liability for business owners go up, there will be a drastic reduction in economic activity. A tremendous amount of money will be siphoned out of the market and into Washington where it will do zero good.
That is exactly what I have been trying to say. The affects of these new regulations and taxes are yet to be determined and that is one reason why the economic growth in America has stagnated.
Concerning the 1099 mandate, what can you tell me about that? I have been doing some reading and from what I can tell, the IRS is going to require businesses and corporations to be their watchdogs. The overall costs for doing that is going to be another tremendous drain on business owners.