Don’t look now, bit we’re about to get final passage on a modest-sized bill. In the United States Congress. In 2010. Crazy, right?
The Senate achieved cloture yesterday on their now-$38 billion dollar micro-jobs bill. You’ll remember that this started out as a $15 billion dollar bill with four components: a job creation tax credit, capital expenditure tax breaks for small business, additional Build America Bonds for state and local infrastructure and a one-year extension of the highway trust fund (which actually costs $20 billion, but if taken care of through an accounting maneuver, so it’s more correct to consider this a $35 billion dollar measure). That passed the Senate, but when the House took it up, they added a few additional measures and also paid for it in full through some changes to foreign tax and trust measures. That ping-ponged back to the Senate, for a change, and they invoked cloture yesterday, which passed with a 61-30 vote.
Six Republican senators — Kit Bond (Mo.), Scott Brown (Mass.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Inhofe (Okla.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) — voted for cloture, while just one Democrat — Ben Nelson (Neb.) — voted against it.
This will pass sometime today, and then go to the President for a signature. Imagine that, the President signing something into law! What a world.
The job creation tax credit that is the centerpiece of this bill is not well-structured, but since it won’t do much to stimulate hiring, at least it gets paid for in this iteration rather than from the overall tax pool.






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