The Republican leadership doesn’t want a proposal that rebuilds schools and poor neighborhoods and keeps state and local employees working, and offers a reduction in payroll taxes. And why do they oppose a reduction in payroll taxes? For the simple reason that they’ll go back up again:
The GOP leaders say such a temporary reduction means taxes will go up later when the reduction expires in 2013.
“While employees would see an additional temporary benefit from this proposal in 2012,” they wrote, “they would experience a larger effective tax increase 12 months later when the payroll tax reverted back to its full level.
“There may be significant unforeseen downsides to large temporary tax cuts immediately followed by large tax increases,” they added.
Using that logic, they should never have approved the sunsetted Bush tax cuts which were built to expire.
