ObamaCare and the ‘Buzzsaw’ of Opposition

By: John Boehner and Mitch McConnell

The president could have chosen a bipartisan approach.

A little over a year ago, when President Obama first took up health-care reform, Republicans reached out to him in the hopes of working together on solutions that would lower health-care costs for families and small businesses. A bipartisan bill focused on lower costs could have been sent to the president’s desk last year, and it would have received the support of the American people.

For instance, this month the president announced his support for additional reforms to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. This is something we can and should be doing already.

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The McConnell Plan

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn’t claim to have developed an economic stimulus plan of his own. But he does favor a cluster of proposals that, when packaged together, are a simple, sensible program for rejuvenating the economy.

I take the liberty of dubbing it the McConnell Plan (without asking the Republican leader’s approval). If enacted, the plan would do a great deal more to boost the economy and increase employment than the “jobs bill” that President Obama and congressional Democrats are cooking up.

McConnell’s set of proposals would do several specific things.  First and foremost, it would provide a measure of certainty to the business and investment community about the future.  The aim:  Produce economic conditions conducive to private investment, economic growth, and job creation.

And the plan would restrain the budget deficit and the national debt, without indulging in what is universally regarded as counterproductive during an economic downturn–raising taxes.

McConnell mentioned two steps to reduce uncertainty about the economic future when I interviewed him recently, and he’s repeated them publicly since then.  One is to declare the effort to enact Democratic health care reform–ObamaCare–over.  “That would be a great relief to American business looking at health care taxes,” he told CNN.

It’s not hard to imagine how this would ease the minds of the CEOs and owners of businesses and prompt them to invest in expansion and begin hiring.  However, it would be up to Obama to put his health care legislation “on the shelf,” as McConnell is urging.  Instead, the president wants Republicans to join him in tweaking ObamaCare and making it a bipartisan bill.  That, in McConnell’s view, is a non-starter.   

The other McConnell idea is an extension of the Bush tax cuts, but not Obama-style.  The president wants to preserve the tax cuts for individuals earning less than $200,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000.

McConnell would extend the tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010, for all taxpayers.   The top rate on individual income would stay at 35 percent, rather than increase to 39.6 percent.  The rate on capital gains would remain at 15 percent, not jump to 20 percent.  And instead of rising to 39.6 percent, the rate on dividends would stay at 15 percent.

There’s a solid reason for preserving Bush’s across-the-board cuts for those above Obama’s income cutoff.  It is these wealthier folks who do the bulk of private investing in America and thus most of the job creating.  Penalizing them with tax increases would discourage both their propensity and their ability to invest.

“If you’re a business now and you’re trying to figure out what the future is, you’re looking at health care taxes, you’re looking at capital gains taxes going up, dividend taxes going up,” McConnell said in a CNN interview. “If you’re a small business and pay taxes as an individual taxpayer, your taxes are going up.  So is that a great environment in which to expand employment?  I don’t think so.”

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Sen. McConnell Statement on Health Care Bill

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following statement Saturday after Senate Democrats voted to move forward with a partisan health care bill which increases premiums, raises taxes and slashes Medicare:

“The health care debate is now officially underway on this 2,074 page, multi-trillion-dollar health care experiment.

“This bill may have been drafted behind closed doors but now it’s the American people’s turn to have their voices heard. For months, they have been asking Congress to do something about the high cost of healthcare and yet the sponsors of this bill responded with a half-trillion dollars in Medicare cuts, massive tax hikes, and an unsustainable expansion of new government programs which Congress’s non-partisan scorekeeper says will result in higher premiums, not lower. It may be a lot of things, but it’s sure not reform.

“Republicans will now provide what the closed-door sessions did not. We will continue to offer the commonsense, step-by-step cost-saving reform that Americans really want.”