Obama Team Considers Tax Credit To Stimulate Hiring
This is good news if it works, and if they can target it where it will get the biggest bang for the buck - sort of like a national "enterprise zone." (If, of course, they can avoid the political pork-pull that inevitably directs the money to the places where it's needed least.) No wonder Eric Cantor's excited about the idea - it's a way of bringing home the bacon without taking a hit for raising taxes:
The idea of a tax credit for companies that create new jobs, something the federal government has not tried since the 1970s, is gaining support among economists and Washington officials grappling with the highest unemployment in a generation.
The proposal has some bipartisan appeal among politicians eager both to help their unemployed constituents and to encourage small-business development. Legislators on Capitol Hill and President Obama’s economic team have been quietly researching the policy for several weeks.
“There is a lot of traction for this kind of idea,” said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip. “If the White House will take the lead on this, I’m fairly positive it would be welcomed in a bipartisan fashion.”
In addition to the economists working on the proposal, some heavyweights support the concept, including the Nobel laureate Edmund S. Phelps, Dani Rodrik of Harvard and former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich.
One version of the approach, to be unveiled next week by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization, would give employers a two-year tax credit if they increased the size of their work force or added significant hours of work (for example, making a part-time worker full time). Employers would receive a credit worth twice the first-year payroll tax for each new hire, amounting to several thousand dollars, depending on the new worker’s salary.
“It’s beautiful if it can be timed at a dire moment like this, when unemployment is way too high and appears to be going somewhat higher,” said Mr. Phelps, an economics professor at Columbia, lamenting that the president dropped it from the $787 billion stimulus plan approved in February. “But it’s a pity that this wasn’t done a year ago.”
The simple fact of the matter is you need to get money to the people who will spend it in order to stimulate demand. THEN there will be a need for jobs. Yet another tax break for corporations that pay little in taxes as it is isn't going to stimulate demand. Or at least I can't see how it would.
will not hire if there is no need to hire. If they're in business now, it isn't lack of a labor force, it is they have enough people to handle the business they are already doing
There needs to be a demand for their products before it will make any economic sense for them to hire new employees. Tax credit or not. So there needs to be a demand created and that's not going to happen when the average Joe and Jane don't have any money to spend. The only kind of employment stimulus that's going to work is one that directly puts money into the publics hands.
and companies get new or previously laid off ones work for nothing.
It will incite mass firings.
Maybe it will get to the smaller companies. The republicans are finally happy the get the tax break they are looking for. It will pass.
Southern Yankee
I doubt it will help the employment situation. It's just another tax-cut for the rich and I've yet to see one of those do a damn thing about employment or the poor and needy which is how they're trying to frame it.
Always trying to help people!
NOBODY 2012
. .
As in businesses portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes??? OH YEAH that ought to help things just fine.
1992 . . 10 million Americans were unemployed, the country faced record deficits, and poverty and welfare rolls were growing. Family incomes were losing ground to inflation and jobs were being created at the slowest rate since the Great Depression.
Hiring where China or India?
Instead of Chinook or Indiana.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Bill Gates says there are not enough qualified Americans.
. . . there are not enough Americans willing to work for what he want's to pay.
You can bet it's a bad fuching idea!
republicanism is a mental illness!
Now, isn't it a shame
How we break each other's hearts
And cause each other pain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuStBNkvwhE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OG3uPULQRs
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
More tax breaks for the wealthy. Wake up America. The progressive tax system worked until it was twisted like a ballon animal to favor the Corps and the super rich. Why do you think Medicare and SS are underfunded? Because the top 5% of filers and the transnationals no longer have to pony up to fund it. Every frikking thing under the sun is a tax break, IF you already have the green.
Tax breaks didn't work in the last 8 years to stimulate the economy. That is crystal clear. It cost us over 2 trillion in lost tax revenue. WTF are they thinking? The super rich and the corporations are the SAME PEOPLE. And they will abscond with this money also. That is also what makes the libertarians and the teabaggers such a pathetically ignorant bunch of morons.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
One by one I watched good local businesses go down the tubes when the Big Chains moved in and constantly undercut the little guys in price.
Americans have to take some blame to for falling for it.
to spark entrepreneurship here. Not to forget the last thing these dinosaur Corporations want to bust up their monopoly is strong, agile, and out of the box thinking competition.
Effectively undermining their fortunes.
Verizon plans on laying employees off. Wouldn't this cause companies to go through with layoffs if they see tax breaks in down the pipe to rehire those same laid off workers.
Obama Team Considers Tax Credit To Stimulate Hiring
if this is his idea of job creation it's not good news at all
we need real jobs, real, living wage, ritirement, health care jobs
what we DON'T need is private industry getting even more middle class assets
this idea of his can go hand in hand of job creation but it can't be the only method
what he needs to do is rebuild the infrastructure with science projects like cooling the planet and alternative fueling infrastructure, not to mention rebuilding the aging infrastructure that stands now
he needs programs that hire people at living wages and that means programs that give us something back for our investment
While I'd like to click my heels and wish this into being a good idea, the rational portions of my brain lead me to wonder how long it'll be before we're calling this the, "Wal-Mart Tax Credit."
I have three ideas for helping the unemployed, instead of the corporate overlords:
1. Stop taxing Unemployment benefits. Now.
2. Establish a new WPA to oversee a network of state-level WPAs.
3. Fund the new WPA apparatus by re-directing all stimulus monies away from any corporation that employs more than --- (pick a number: 50, 100, 150), people. Alternatively, give the new WPA the $$$ that's currently propping up the Department of Homeland Security boondoggle.
Even if we don't create a 21st Century WPA, I'd still give any future stimulus monies to actual small businesses and/or municipalities. No more free rides for oligarchs.
Yes to a WPA.
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
100%. That is exactly what's needed! The money needs to go to working people and small business NOT corporations!
The WPA (along with arts funding), was probably the New Deal program most hated by Republicans.
Resurrecting it would give the GOP a collective stroke - talk about a win-win!
and use it for public works. Clean up our country. Replace falling apart bridges. Things that will not only benefit those employed in these tasks but will benefit all of us. THAT'S what should be being done.
...WPA.
Another corporate bailout.
Hire people directly like the WPA did. We've got about 50,000 bridges that are ready to fall down and tens of thousands of miles of decrepit old power lines that desperately need to be renewed and improved.
What ever happened to the "smart grid"?
All are Wall Streeters who only care about bean counting and tax breaks.
If McCain had won last November, he would have had most of the same people in the same cabinet financial seats.
it must be teh awesome! Wow, what a fan-fuking-tastic idea. Tax cuts = stimulus. Where have I heard that before? I'll buy in if they can show me one time, just one, where a tax cut like this has stimulated anything besides a CEO's portfolio.
Apply tax penalties to business that layoff or fire employees. Assess fines and fees for businesses that pay executives at a rate 10 times more than the lowest paid employee. Make all peasant insurance illegal and punishable by imprisonment. And finally, Pay the money directly to the employee, tax free as an outsourced federal employee with full medical and retirement benefits. A little competition never hurt any anyone, right?
might create is Internet Post Scrubbers.
job upgrades won't happen without affordable health care. How can companies afford to add people to their rolls?
I had a job I truly loved but had to move on as they couldn't make me full time (a level I could have barely paid the bills at) as they would have had to offer benefits and they couldn't afford that.
So without at least the Public Option, and better, Single Payer, few part time jobs will move up to full time, it isn't cost effective.
This is going to send the out of work wingnuts into a frothy rage!
This is a whole now greedy beast the majority of companies are not going to hire anyone anytime soon. Why because they refuse to accept that this is a recesstion/ drepresstion and lower there insane expected profit rates which they demand or they fire people and raise the price of whatever product they sell.
Business has fundamental changed in the US over the last 20-30 years the old ideas don't apply.
How about making it a law that you have to have the minimum number of employees to run any business?
Don't be giving them any ideas!! They've been out to destroy small business for decades as it is!
Looked at in terms of macro economics it make sense and I have not seen one comment that viewed in this context.
Micro economics is your paycheck.
Macro economics is everyones paycheck.
Macro economics requires looking months and even years out.
Micro economics is looking at next month.
My intention is not to preach, but to point out that we have some one who is an economics professor as president and with the counsel of the best we have will make correct decisions regarding economic policy.
Look, we put our trust in him last November and I believe he doing the best he can. Hope and Change. What is the alternative? Get on board the "sane train" and help shovel in the coal!
Whatever your intention was, I suspect that most us aren't listening to you because you don't know what you're talking about.
Who is this economics professor that you believe is the President? Larry Summers? I have no idea who you're talking about, but the actual President, Barack Obama, was briefly a professor of Constitutional Law.
The closest thing we've had in recent years to an economist President was George W. Bush, who has an M.B.A.. Gosh, that worked out well for the macro-economy, didn't it?
Eric Cantor is Jewish ... so maybe there's another way to say, "Bringing home the bacon"?! ;-)
Again with the backwards solution.
We've got some real Hooverites running our economic policies, and their prescriptions are working about as well as Hoover's.
And now Americans are almost at the point where they can't even imagine an economic policy that favors the working and middle class and not the upper 1%. It's literally unimaginable to practically everyone, and so Hooverite solutions that don't work are proposed and implemented over and over.
We needed a real jobs program and a real debt relief program for the working and middle classes a long time ago. What we got was a bailout of the rich and a payoff of their gambling debts at the expense of the working and middle classes. And what we're told is that "things would have been worse" if they hadn't gotten their pound of flesh up front. And there's "no money" to fund jobs programs and debt relief for the working and middle classes. Too bad, so sad.
But at least our rulers are waking up to the fact that if nothing continues to be done about the shocking levels of unemployment and underemployment in this country there will be a political price to pay. So they will propose doing the least possible for the fewest. And call it a success.
Fffft.
It's not enough to hire someone, if we don't start pushing this nation to start making things again here in the US, then this will be just a band-aid on a gaping wound. They are doing nothing to improve the largest crisis which is our debt crisis, they are only making it worse.
Goodnight, Frau Blücher
Comments are closed on this entry