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Senate votes to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, over 700,000 may lose jobs

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Photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Yesterday, the Senate narrowly voted (51-48) to raise taxes on 1.2 million small businesses, which will likely kill more than 700,000 jobs at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Jim Webb (D-VA) joined all Republicans in bipartisan opposition to the tax hike.

This is President Obama’s economic plan. This is what he asked Congress to do. And he recently told a fundraising crowd that his economic plan has been working.

“Just like we’ve tried [Republicans’] plan, we tried our plan—and it worked,” he said.

But Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, said yesterday that “the economy is not growing fast enough,” acknowledging that “unemployment is very high.” “The institutions with authority should be doing everything they can to try to make economic growth stronger,” he said.

The President’s plan, now endorsed by the Democratic majority in the Senate, has little chance of going anywhere in the House of Representatives. But it has put the 51 Senators who want to raise taxes on record.

Perhaps the biggest lie in the tax debate is that this vote affects only “the rich.” That’s simply not true. Many small businesses, known as flow-through businesses, pay their taxes through the individual income tax. Ernst and Young estimates that these types of businesses “employ 54% of the private sector work force.” This tax hike squarely hits 1.2 million of these businesses that hire workers and have incomes above $200,000.

Read more from this story HERE.

Labor Battle at Center of Virginia Senate Race

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The new Boeing Dreamliner plant in North Charleston, S.C., is a few hundred miles from George Allen’s campaign headquarters in Richmond, but if Allen and the Old Dominion’s GOP have their way, the bitter battle between the airline manufacturer and the National Labor Relations Board will help determine Virginia’s next U.S. senator.

That race, expected to be among the most expensive and competitive of 2012 U.S. Senate contests, most likely will pit Allen, a former Virginia governor and senator, against Tim Kaine, who also served a term as Virginia governor and who most recently chaired the Democratic National Committee. The two are vying for the seat held by Democrat Jim Webb, who chose not to seek re-election after just one term.

Five years ago, George Allen was a popular Republican senator often talked about in conservative circles as a potential presidential candidate. His near-certain path to re-election was compromised when he referred to a 20-year-old Democratic volunteer as “a macaca” at a political rally. The volunteer, then a University of Virginia student who worked for Webb’s campaign, is of Indian ancestry, and the previously unheard-of term was widely perceived as an ethnic slur.

Allen later apologized, but he paid for the gaffe with his Senate seat. (He repented again at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last month.) Now he is attempting a comeback based not on personality but on curbing spending, growing jobs and allowing businesses to be more competitive. Specifically the GOP candidate is invoking a specter that’s also been a feature of the presidential contest: Democrats’ close ties to Big Labor.

Allen’s campaign is seeking to capitalize on a lawsuit filed by the National Labor Relations Board against Boeing for opening new manufacturing plants in South Carolina instead of in Washington state, partly to avoid the labor trouble that has prompted recent strikes by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The machinists union sued Boeing, alleging that moving some of its manufacturing operations to a right-to-work state was a form of retaliation prohibited by federal law.

Read More at Real Clear Politics By Caitlin Huey-Burns, Real Clear Politics