Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders by Eric Cantor;Paul Ryan;Kevin McCarthy Read Free Book Online

we proposed at that meeting could not have been more different than the bloated $787 billion monstrosity that was eventually passed by the Democratic Congress. It was a simple, direct way to create jobs and help our economy by focusing on small businesses. Here are the highlights of the plan I handed the president:
Reducing the lowest individual tax rates from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent
Allowing small business to reduce its tax liability by 20 percent
Ensuring no tax increases to pay for spending
Assistance for the unemployed
A home-buyers credit of $7,500 for those buyers who can make a minimum down payment of 5 percent
    Not only was our plan fair, understandable, and more direct than the Democratic majority’s bill, it delivered twice the bang for half the bucks spent in the Democratic plan. In fact, Ways and Means Ranking Member Dave Camp of Michigan and his staff used the Obama administration’s own economic model to analyze our alternative stimulus bill that they determined would create twice the jobs at half the cost of the bill that was eventually passed.
    After I handed him the plan, President Obama’s response was encouraging, albeit in a backhanded kind of way. “Eric, there’s nothing too crazy in here,” he said. And he was right, of course.
    We genuinely wanted to find a way to produce the best economic recovery bill we could. Paul, Kevin, and I and the other members of the House Republican Economic Recovery Working Group purposefully checked our ideologyat the door when we formulated our plan. Would we have much preferred a bill that eliminated the business income tax and lowered all tax rates? You bet we would have. But we didn’t come into the meeting naïve enough to think that the new administration would follow such a plan, rejecting their own Keynesian beliefs. We knew that they would dismiss a Republican plan like that out of hand. Instead, we were realistic and we made an honest, good faith effort to work with the administration and came with an incremental, pro-small-business, and free-market alternative.
    Helping small businesses, the engine of job creation, was of special concern to us. One of the ways we proposed to alleviate the tax burden they face each and every day was by reducing the effective tax rate by 20 percent. The mom-and-pop stores and restaurants that I visited at home in my district were telling me this was the tax break they needed to invest in new equipment or new hires.
    So there I was, explaining to President Obama and his economic brain trust—including Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, chief economic adviser Larry Summers and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel—what deli owners, shopkeepers, and service providers in Richmond were telling me they needed. And as the meeting continued, I could tell the president’s team wasn’t getting it. Even though these were some of the smartest people in the country, they were entirely disconnected from the realities and concerns of small businessmen and -women.They were all talented, conscientious public servants, but their experience—and their hearts—just weren’t in the private sector. To put it another way, this was an administration of the government, by the government, and for the government —not entrepreneurs or the private sector.
    Still, we had what the press in Washington calls a “frank exchange” of views and ideas in the meeting. The Republicans present argued that lifting the tax burden on individuals and businesses was needed to create jobs. But instead of doing that, while we tried to reason with the president, Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey (D-MI) and the Democratic leadership in Congress had turned the stimulus bill into a bloated grab bag of taxpayer-funded government gifts to special interests. How could we support a bill that spends $12 on new cars for the federal government for every $1 in tax relief to small businesses? How could we expect a