Dewhurst supported Obama's Trojan Horse "stimulus" tax hike
When Barack Obama passed his $831 billion "stimulus" bill, he included lots of tricks that were designed to trap state governments into increasing spending and taxes. One of the biggest Obama stimulus tricks was giving away money for unemployment insurance, but with major strings attached. Obama's stimulus bill forced state governments to agree to raise taxes in order to receive federal money.
Check out what Governor Rick Perry said about Obama's back-door big government ruse:
I did reject $555 million in federal stimulus dollars that would have mandated the state of Texas to pay costlier benefits and put higher taxes on Texas employers indefinitely. Even if we had accepted these stimulus funds, Texas would have still seen higher unemployment taxes, bond financing and federal borrowing to keep benefits from the UI Trust Fund flowing.David Dewhurst has been calling himself a fighter during this campaign. So you'd expect that he fought tooth and nail against Obama's attempt to force Texas to raise taxes, right?
WRONG. Under David Dewhurst's leadership, the Texas Senate passed Obama's back-door tax hike.* While Texas liberals applauded, Dewhurst said nothing. As Lieutenant Governor, he could have stopped the bill in a million ways through procedural trickery. Dewhurst did nothing.
But maybe it wasn't that big of a deal? Wrong. Obama's hidden tax increase is a big job killer.
Last week, Nina Easton reported in Fortune magazine about how the provision is killing jobs (hat tip to Push Junction for the link). The piece is called The silent job killer: Our unemployment system
Between 2008 and 2011, $174 billion in unemployment taxes was collected while $450 billion was paid out in benefits, a gap of $276 billion. 34 states blew through their unemployment insurance trust funds and borrowed from Washington -- and 22 of those still owe the feds a total of more than $30 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. The foundation's study concluded that some states will not fully repay those loans for years.Read the full Easton piece to get a full sense of just how bad taking the unemployment money would have been for Texas. Here's a snippet:The new costs of hiring [from Obama's unemployment insurance "stimulus"] come just as the National Federation of Independent Business has published a gloomy survey of small companies showing negative job creation and pessimism about the future. "There was no good news in the June survey" released last week, the trade association said. "NFIB members didn't add a lot of jobs and don't plan to in the coming months."
While South Carolina businesses with no past unemployment claims will see a tax reduction, businesses with a history of layoffs -- about a third of them in this state, where unemployment is still over 9% -- face job-crippling increases ranging from 100% to 600%.Cyclical jobs like manufacturing would have faced huge tax increases for hiring more workers. That was kosher to Dewhurst. Fortunately Governor Perry rejected the Dewhurst Senate's attempt to kill Texas jobs!
Why did Dewhurst fail to do anything to stop Obama's job-killing tax hikes? On May 12, 2010 David Dewhurst sat down for an interview with the Texas Tribune, and he told us why: he supported them!
Transcript:
David Dewhurst: I can make an argument [for or against].Dewhurst goes on to say that it was a "very, very close" decision, even though he would have taken the money.
Evan Smith: But you support the governor's decision in the end to not take the money?
David Dewhurst: I probably would have taken the money.
David Dewhurst had his chance to stand up to all of Obama's hidden taxes and fight for Texas. Instead Dewhurst joined with moderate Republicans like Kevin Eltife and Bob Deuell to pass a bill that would have raised taxes and killed jobs.
How can Dewhurst ask us to trust him to fight Obama and ObamaCare when Dewhurst supported Obama's job-killing tax hikes?
* With Dewhurst's tacit support, moderate Republicans Kevin Eltife and Bob Deuell led the charge to approve Obama's tax hike.
Read more about Unvetted Dewhurst
Posted by Evan @ 07/25/12 05:13 PM
Previous Entry | Home | Next Entry
Comments
Add Comments
No flames or impolite behavior. HTML will be stripped. URLs will be transformed into hyperlinks.
Comments must be approved before being published. Thank you!