President Obama is poised to deliver his major address on rebooting the economy in Cleveland at 2:10 EST today, but despite the fact that some of the provisions have been desired by Republicans for a long time, there's no incentive for them to support them now, and thus analysts believe they will die on the vine.
From today's Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama travels to Cleveland to deliver a key-note economic speech Wednesday that will outline plans to enhance and permanently extend the research and experimentation tax credit, allow businesses to write 100% of their investments off their taxes through 2011, and pump another $50 billion of infrastructure spending into the economic bloodstream.
Businesses say the tax proposals are helpful but no substitute for what they really want: broad-based changes to the corporate tax code and an extension of President George W. Bush's tax cuts, which expire in January. Republicans have criticized the proposals as a Stimulus II, while urging Democrats running for office to reject it.
Despite the calls for the speech to be dead on arrival, the White House is actually trying to do something here. Again from the Journal:
The White House has worked hard to gain political traction ahead of the Cleveland speech. Mr. Obama called Sen. George Voinovich (R., Ohio) over the weekend to discuss the infrastructure plan. The White House's business liaison office reached out to the Business Roundtable to discuss the business-investment and research-and-development proposals.
Some legislative discussions have begun. The Democrats could tack a version of an R&D extension or business-investment incentive onto legislation that extends the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, but not to households earning more than $250,000.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2010.
