By Cong. Kevin Brady
Texas Insider Report: WASHINGTON D.C. With the payroll tax negotiations underway investigations into Fast & Furious and the Solyndra scandal among others its a busy time in Washington D.C. I look forward to
this Wednesday when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will answer questions about the administrations latest budget in a House Ways & Means Committee hearing.
ALSO: Offer on Payroll Tax Negotiations Puzzling"
Real reforms rejected; No proposal offered to fill Social Security hole created by payroll tax holiday
After weeks of public meetings a long-awaited counter-proposal to extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits through the end of the year was revealed on Thursday leaving members of the Republican negotiating team including me scratching our heads.
Its puzzling. Democrats offered no ideas on how to pay for all the new spending rejected all of the job-ready reforms and barely changed the unemployment weeks to 93. Even President Obama has called for scaling them back to 79 weeks.
With the clock ticking to an end-of-month deadline time is running out so we expected something more substantive than this. Read more about the offer and the bipartisan reform plan that passed the house
here.
Watch my opening statement at the February 7th Joint Economic Committee hearing on extending the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits
here.
New unemployment numbers do not tell the whole story
Whether we care to admit it or not 2.8 million more people were still out of work in January 2012 than the 12.8 million officially counted as unemployed.
Our labor force should not be shrinking because people stop actively seeking jobs. It should be increasing because like 243000 other Americans this month there are new payroll jobs for them.
I dont believe we should have to wait another two years to get back to pre-recession levels of employment. Taxes are scheduled to increase at year-end and our economy remains vulnerable to external events such as the Euro-crisis.
We need new economic policies and we need them now.
Read my post in
The Hill.
