Florida Candidates Spar on Tax Cuts
Bloomberg Business Week reports:
Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The three Florida candidates for the U.S. Senate, heading into the final week of the 2010 campaign, battled today over the merits of President Barack Obama’s economic agenda and extending the tax cuts implemented under his predecessor, Republican George W. Bush.
Marco Rubio, the Republican nominee and front-runner in most polls, said the Obama administration’s policies have created an atmosphere of uncertainty in which companies can’t commit to hiring new workers.
Businesses “are afraid of what next year is going to mean in terms of taxes, regulation and the health-care bill,” Rubio said today in a debate on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He ruled out signing onto any compromise that doesn’t extend all the Bush-era tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, which lowered rates on wages and investments for all Americans, and which are due to expire on Dec. 31.
Obama favors extending the tax cuts only for households earning less than $250,000, about 98 percent of all taxpayers. Rubio argued that anything short of extending them for all Americans, poor and wealthy alike, would amount to a tax increase at a particularly vulnerable time for the U.S. economy.
“There’s a difference between compromise and cutting a deal,” Rubio said. “Compromise is a good thing. Cutting deals in Washington, there’s too much of that.”
Rubio, who has received strong support from Tea Party activists, held a 15-percentage point lead over Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who is running for Senate as an independent, and a 21-point advantage over four-term Democratic congressman Kendrick Meek in a poll released yesterday by the St. Petersburg Times, Miami Herald and Bay News 9.
