This was settled last night with the Republicans in the House backing down from their position that a two month break was "business as usual" and let's get a comprehensive agreement, including a one year extension of the lowered SS tax rate.
The Repubs were right on the substance (my opinion) but according to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, wrong on the politics of it.
WSJ: "How did Republicans manage to lose the tax issue to Obama?"
House Republicans yesterday voted down the Senate's two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday to 4.2% from 6.2%. They say the short extension makes no economic sense, but then neither does a one-year extension. No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year's tax holiday has demonstrated. The entire exercise is political, but Republicans have thoroughly botched the politics.
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If Republicans didn't want to extend the payroll tax cut on the merits, then they should have put together a strategy and the arguments for defeating it and explained why.
But if they knew they would eventually pass it, as most of them surely believed, then they had one of two choices. Either pass it quickly and at least take some political credit for it.
Kind of cynical of the Journal?
Here's the Washington Post -
The best solution at this point would be for embattled House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to back away from the cliff to which his rebellious caucus has driven him and to agree to the Senate bill in exchange for a promise from the Senate to return earlier than late January and have conferees work on a year-long extension. It is telling that the speaker, having promised a new, open House, refused to allow the Senate measure to come to the floor for an up-or-down vote, in which enough Republicans might have voted with Democrats to approve the measure.
It appears that Boehner took the Post's advice.
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