Read My Lips: No New Bailouts

Coffee Brown, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News

Reps. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) said President Obama’s budget “taxes too much” and presented an outline of their alternative.

The President’s budget would add up to $3,100 per year per family in increased energy costs via the cap and trade policy, which their statement referred to as “cap-and-tax.” Both representatives also said that many small businesses would pay more in direct taxes. Pence acknowledged that that was so only if the business owner files as an individual and is making over $250,000, but that is commonly done in order to avoid the higher corporate rate. In effect, those small business owners whose personal profits exceed a quarter million dollars per year would be forced to choose between the already higher corporate or the now higher personal tax bracket.

Roskam said that many of the small businesses in his area were “in survival mode.” It was unclear whether he was including those whose personal profits would create such a tax dilemma.

Pence was emphatic that the “first principle is no new bailouts.” He repeated three times that the majority of Republicans had opposed bailouts even when their leadership supported the strategy.

The other principles outlined were: no tax hikes, limiting the federal budget from growing faster than family budgets, reforming the financial system, controlling energy costs with increased exploration, as well as developing new energy sources and supporting long-term price stability.

The nuts and bolts of how to do those things will be the topic of several subsequent presentations, Pence finished.