Senate Democrats, who are desperate to stimulate the economy but don’t have the money to pass traditional stimulus legislation, will turn to cutting business taxes when they return to Washington this fall.
In doing so, they will try to drive a wedge between business interests and the GOP leadership, who has tried to block almost every element of the Democratic agenda, by pushing a round of corporate tax breaks, say Senate Democratic aides.
[...]
Their first tax proposal is to make the corporate research and development tax credit permanent. The second is to pass an Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit. This would create a 30 percent tax credit for companies that manufacture new clean-energy technologies, which Democratic aides say would help create thousands of new jobs around the country.
A third idea is to extend the payroll tax cut Congress enacted in December and expand it to employers, reducing the cost of labor. And a fourth option is to give employers tax breaks for hiring new employees, an idea Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee panned in 2009 but now seems more attractive.
Excellent idea - let's give even more tax breaks to businesses that are already sitting on Scrooge McDuck Money Bin sized piles of cash so they can hire people to keep up with the demand that isn't there from all the customers that they don't have. But this is all we can do, because true stimulative economic policies aren't "politically feasible" and our political overlords are a bunch of lazy pussies that only want to try what they can pass even if what can pass is useless shit, rather than fight for something that might have a better chance of dragging us out of the quagmire.
I like the neat little rhetorical flair at the beginning of this article too: Senate Democrats "don't have the money to pass traditional stimulus legislation." Right. Because tax cuts are always free!
Now let's just get some patent reform bills going, and then the epic pivot to jobs will be complete.
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