Yesterday’s 85-2 cloture vote on the substitute amendment attaching the home buyer tax credit expansion and the tax loss carry back extension to the bill extending unemployment benefits up to a total of 99 weeks for out of work Americans whose benefits have already run out or will run out by Thanksgiving or Christmas. Republican partisan maneuvering could delay a second required cloture vote until as late as 11:40 tonight, and if cloture is approved, there will be another 30 hours of debate under Senate rules, unless the Republican Senators yield back their time. This means the earliest likely vote in the bill in the Senate would be Thursday, and a floor vote in the House Friday, Saturday, or not until a week from Thursday, as Congress expects to take Monday through Wednesday off for the Veterans’ Day holiday.
Republicans are steamed because they wanted to offer another amendment to the bill, to end the TARP program of huge corporate bailouts. They know the amendment would fail, but they want to make a political point using a relatively unpopular economic stimulus program to do so. Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri also blasted the home buyer tax credit expansion on the Senate floor. “For the vast majority of cases, the home buyer tax credit amounted to a free gift, since it did not affect their decision to purchase,” Bond asserted. “And for the small minority of buyers whose decision was directly caused by this credit, this raises the question of whether we are subsidizing buyers who may not have been able to afford a home in the first place.”
The expanded $8,000 first time home buyer credit can be used on homes costing up to $800,000.00, by families earning up to $225,000.00 per year. A reduced credit of $6,500.00 is available to any family that had lived in a current home for five years and buys a new home before April 30, 2010.
The unemployment benefit extension will give 14 additional weeks of benefits to all Americans who are out of work, and six weeks more than that to those living27 states where unemployment is over 8.5% Labor Department statistics show 35.6% of those out of work now have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks, and this bill will extend benefits for up to 99 weeks altogether.
The tax loss carry back amendment to the bill will give all businesses the ability to get tax refunds for the last five years using losses from either 2008 or 2009 against profits in past yeast the business already paid taxes on.
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