Political Quotes

“I say to my colleague, obviously, we don't know because we haven't read it. But what my staff believes, from contact they have had with other staff, is that in order to make room for a bunch of other spending, that incentive program has been slashed. The amount of money has at least been cut in half. The people eligible to take advantage of it have been narrowed to first-time home buyers. There would be an income cap. I think now that CBO would score that somewhere in the neighborhood of about $2 billion, meaning that the impact of it on the economy could not be particularly significant. May I mention one other thing, because it reminded me of another idea that we had. We had a lot of good ideas because we wanted to make sure this would work. We mentioned, several of us, the fact that 80 percent of the jobs are created by small business. So we looked in the bill to see where the relief would be targeted to small businesses to encourage them to hire more folks. When we finally found what was in there, it amounted to .8 of 1 percent of all of tax provisions in here that could be utilized by small business, hiring 80 percent of the jobs. Only .8 of 1 percent of the bill is dedicated to those kind of businesses as tax relief. So when we talk about targeted, well, our idea of targeting relief obviously does not comport with the authors of the bill, and that is another one of the real questions and concerns we have about this legislation.”