Obama

Source: sayanythingblog.com --- 19 minutes ago
Obama is proposing tax relief in the form of tax write offs for businesses that invest in new equipment and other business infrastructure. The problem is, that’s not really what the economy needs right now. President Obama, in one of his most dramatic gestures to business, will propose that companies be allowed to write off 100 percent of their new investment in plant and equipment through 2011, a plan that White House economists say would cut business taxes by nearly $200 billion over two years. The proposal, to be laid out Wednesday in a speech in Cleveland, tops a raft of announcements, from a proposed expansion of the research and experimentation tax credit to $50 billion in additional spending on roads, railways and runways. But unlike those two ideas, both familiar from Obama’s 2008 campaign, the investment incentive would embrace a long-held wish by conservative economists that had never won support from either Republican or Democratic administrations. There’s nothing inherently harmful in this proposal. The economy isn’t going to be hurt by these expanded write-offs (as opposed to Obama’s proposed payroll tax holiday which is going to put a serious budgeting hole in the already beleaguered Social Security and Medicare programs), but they aren’t likely to stimulate economic growth. A reader emails: When the fundamental problem is excess capacity because of Obama caused incertinty, buying more of it doesn’t solve the problem. ...