photo: Old Sarge via Flickr
The Senate will move forward with a jobs bill this week, and nobody has a good handle on everything it will include. But Harry Reid is being pretty clear about his strategy: it’s a “jobs agenda,” not one big bill.
UPDATE 4:35 PM: Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed that Democrats planned to move forward with a jobs package that would include small business tax credits, a one-year reauthorization of the highway trust fund, money for Build America Bonds and some form of tax credit for employers who add new jobs.
On the last item, Reid specifically mentioned the Schumer-Hatch proposal to provide a payroll tax break to employers. The jury is still out on whether Democrats will be able to finalize details of a job tax credit program for inclusion in the very first jobs bill that moves in the next couple of weeks. But Reid stressed that his plan isn’t just to move one measure. “We do not have a jobs bill. We have a jobs agenda we’re working on,” Reid said.
To that end, today Reid and Jay Rockefeller dropped an extension of Medicaid help for the states, which would provide around around $23 billion in aid through June of 2011, basically picking up the tab for the next fiscal year. This was in the President’s budget but not necessarily part of a “jobs bill”. And there are other elements, like extending the COBRA subsidy and unemployment benefits, or the small business lending initiative, as well.
The strategy certainly appears to be to break measures that would strengthen economic activity and job creation into discrete parts, and move them separately. If I would guess, the goal seems to be to lessen the sticker shock of a big jobs bill number. Democrats are right to criticize the size of the bill, but they need to take into account all the different pieces, which when combined do get you pretty close if not beyond the House’s $154 billion dollar bill passed back in December ‘09. I would submit that even that is not a level that meets the jobs crisis, but it’s better than the $80 billion top line number that everyone is discussing.
The pitfall here is that four separate pieces of legislation could take four times as long to get through the Senate, and would be subject to all kinds of obstruction.
UPDATE: Reid, Durbin, Baucus and Dorgan will unveil their jobs bill tomorrow morning.
