Once again, President Obama missed an opportunity to reach across the aisle and present fresh, broadly appealing solutions to our nation’s most pressing challenges. Instead of embracing a bipartisan approach to overhauling our entire tax code—an approach that already exists thanks to the hard work of Republican Representative Dave Camp and Democrat Senator Max Baucus—the president proposed an inequitable campaign idea that only reforms the corporate code. It gives relief to big corporations, but not to small businesses and families. Instead of agreeing to broad principles on which we all ought to agree—like securing the future of Medicare and Social Security, or balancing the federal budget—he signaled that he will bypass Congress in specific ways ‘wherever and whenever’ he can. And while we would all like to create more jobs and increase personal incomes, the president proposed stale partisan policies under the guise of new ideas. Instead, I had hoped he would have offered new solutions to improve current policies which are failing American workers. For example, he might have addressed the detrimental economic effects of the 30-hour definition of full-time employment in Obamacare’s employer mandate, which was the subject of a Ways and Means Committee hearing earlier today. This provision is causing millions of hourly workers across the country to see their hours and wages cut. That’s why proposals to restore the traditional 40-hour definition have been introduced by Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate, including my own Save American Workers Act. As partisan gridlock intensifies, these are the sorts of things President Obama should have focused on. Instead, he stuck to the old familiar script and once again missed the mark.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 03:28:06 +0000
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