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Former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday called President Trump's executive order to cut payroll taxes "a reckless war on Social Security." One of the several orders Trump signed from his private club in Bedminster, N.J., Saturday afternoon directs the Treasury Department to allow employers to defer payment of employee-side Social Security payroll taxes through the end of the year for Americans making less than roughly $100,000 annually. Trump also said that he intends to forgive the deferred payroll taxes and make permanent payroll tax cuts if he is reelected in November. In an emailed statement addressing the president's order,...

As Guy Benson reported earlier today, a new poll of likely voters conducted for Townhall by Gravis Marketing found that Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was statistically tied with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) at 45 percent in the race for Lousiana's U.S. Senate seat.That result is right in line with both the RealClearPolicits poll average of the race (Cassidy +1.3) and the HuffPost Pollster model (Cassidy +.5).In addition to the top line result, however, Gravis also included a question, at the request of Townhall, that may provide Republicans a better way to answer Democratic questions about raising the minimum wage on the campaign trail. Gravis asked, "Given the...

You’d think when the Huffington Post’s top writer on finance writes about the tax code, he’d understand at least how the tax code works. But in an age when “finance” editors, like the HuffPo’s Mark Gongloff, are demonstrably anti-business, pro-Occupy and work as shills for progressive ideas, facts take a back seat to ideology, outrage and agendas. The latest outrage Gongloff has taken issue with is how little of the U.S. tax revenue, on a percentage basis, is generated by corporate taxes, as opposed to the good old days of the 1950s. He even has a chart to prove it...

President Obama is on his way back to Washington, as the Associated Press reports that he's "cutting short his traditional Christmas holiday in Hawaii, planning to leave for Washington on Wednesday evening... expected to arrive in Washington early Thursday." Most Americans probably won't sympathize that the President has a short vacation - after all, at work, he didn't get that big project finished in time for the holidays. The elements of the fiscal cliff can be roughly divided into four categories: defense spending cuts, non-defense spending cuts, income tax hikes, and payroll tax hikes. Of these, what has gotten the...

The Congressional Budget Office released their analysis of the group of deficit-fighting policies known as the "fiscal cliff." The big takeaway: completely averting the contraction that would occur in 2013 and 2014 would cost $1.16 trillion - entirely deficit-financed. There would certainly be some economic benefits to all of this, however. The CBO has a wide range of estimates for the positives - between 0.8% and 5% growth in real GDP, and between 1.1 million and 5.8 million new jobs. There are a lot of caveats here, as it's an incredibly wide range of estimates, but there would certainly be...

President Barack Obama listed rising gas prices as among the many reasons to extend the payroll tax cut Tuesday, flanked by individuals the White House promoted as being affected by $40 per paycheck the average American would lose if the tax cut is not extended at the end of February. The payroll tax funds Social Security. Cutting the tax would reduce funding to Social Security by $119 billion over the next year, on top of the $105 billion reduced from funding in 2011.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has signed a $1 trillion-plus 2012 spending bill that sets the day-to-day budgets of 10 Cabinet agencies. The Senate approved the bill last Saturday in a flurry of year-end activity that was overshadowed by an ensuing confrontation over extending a payroll tax cut.

Senate just passed the two month extention of the "tax cut" House about to meet...to pass it under a UC (unanimous consent) motion. If any ONE Republican shows up and objects..it can't pass.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday he would tell his caucus to get "noisy" if he were trying to game out the dispute on a payroll tax cut with President Obama. Asked about the standoff by a voter, the Republican presidential candidate also called the senators "arrogant" over their refusal to negotiate. “I would have all of my members on talk radio back home demanding the senators come back. And I could say 'How can the senators arrogantly go home." Gingrich, who has previously said he doesn't know what John Boehner is going through because President...

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, phoned President Obama this morning and asked him to send members of his economic team to the Capitol to end the political stalemate and negotiate a path toward a one-year extension of the payroll tax credit. The president declined the offer. “With Sen. Reid having declined to call his members back to Washington this week to join the House in negotiating a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, the speaker proposed that the president send members of his economic policy team up to Congress to

The standoff over preserving a tax break continued as House Speaker John Boehner showed little sign of reversing course despite sustained criticism from his own party and President Obama. Boehner assembled his top negotiators for a second day at an otherwise empty Capitol, but their position is being overpowered by the risk of a looming tax hike on Jan. 1. Obama planned to showcase stories of workers who will lose $40 a paycheck later Thursday at the White House.  “We’re fighting to do the right thing,” said Boehner, who wants to launch formal negotiations with Democrats to resolve differing approaches...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has just offered a way out for House Republicans, who are badly losing the public relations war over the payroll tax cut. He's calling on Speaker of the House John Boehner to give in and pass a bill to extend the payroll tax cut — implicitly the bill that passed the Senate by an 89-10 margin on Saturday. As a compromise, he also calls on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to appoint negotiators on a year-long extension of the payroll tax cut — which Reid has already pledged to do once the House passed...

Ed Henry of Fox News has been tweeting about the rumors: President basically told Boehner, if you pass two-month extension Democrats will move forward on talks over one-year deal … This is big morning in this story: now have the outline of a deal; if Boehner passes two-month extend, Reid appoints conferees on 1-yr deal Update: It’s being widely reported that Boehner tried to get Obama to reopen negotiations, but ended up with a refusal: “The speaker explained his concern that flaws in the Senate-passed bill will be unworkable for many small business job creators,” an aide to the Ohio...

How to Lose An Election by Fighting the Wrong Battle on the Democrat's Timetable "Payroll tax cut," even the title is a lie. "Retirement income funding cut" would be more accurate. I'm tired of these left-wing euphemisms and the MSM's relentless use of them in their campaign to keep Democrats in office. This battle was one which should have been won back six months ago. I don't know what it is about Republicans that every year they allow these sorts of emotionally charged paycheck issues to be postponed until Christmas time and then suddenly they decide that it's time for...

What does this say about Obama? He was once against short term bills, like continuing resolutions on the debt ceiling, saying that they could hurt the economy, slow the recovery, etc. Now Obama is for a short term bill (2 month extension of the payroll tax cuts) saying that it needs to be passed, or the economy will be hurt, the recovery could be slowed, etc. Obama was against it before he was for it.

Christmas sparring in the nation's capitol has picked up tempo, and we can look forward to another holiday season of contention as the Statists and right-to-be-let-aloners grapple to the mat. The WSJ reports on the Republican House's refusal to approve a Democratic Senate's bill to temporarily extend a payroll tax cut until February. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) thinks that the Senate plan is dysfunctional. "How can you do tax policy for two months?" Good question. And the answer is that you can't. That such is the Democrats preferred method of addressing the economy--push matters out for a bit until...

WASHINGTON — Who is paying for the two-month extension of the payroll tax cut working its way through Congress? The cost is being dropped in the laps of most people who buy homes or refinance beginning next year. The typical person who buys a $200,000 home or refinances that amount starting on Jan. 1 would have to pay roughly $17 more a month for their mortgage, thanks to a fee increase included in the payroll tax cut bill that the Senate passed Saturday. The White House said the fee increases would be phased in gradually. The legislation provides a two-month...

We've largely ignored the not-so-great payroll tax debate on the assumption that it would pass in any case and won't matter much to the economy. But now things are getting interesting: If Republicans hang tough, they might even get a useful policy victory in return for giving President Obama his political fillip. Keep in mind that the payroll tax "cut" is nothing more than a tax holiday. All the political palaver is about extending it for one more year, through 2012, so Mr. Obama can claim he did something for middle-class voters before Election Day. Because it is temporary, the...

The payroll-tax-cut debate is not really about the payroll tax, which is a very weak-kneed economic stimulant and a lackluster job creator because of its temporary nature. Without permanent incentives at lower tax rates, these rebates don’t do anything for growth and jobs. Instead, the key to understanding the payroll-tax debate is to grasp Pres. Barack Obama’s leftist vision of taxing successful earners (the millionaire surtax) and his obsession with clean energy at the expense of fossil fuels. These are ideological positions. They support the Obama vision of class warfare and his attachment to radical environmentalism. And the key to...

Not so much a big win for us as a big loss for them. Democrats backed away from their demand for higher taxes on millionaires as part of legislation to extend Social Security tax cuts for most Americans on Wednesday as Congress struggled to clear critical year-end bills without triggering a partial government shutdown… Republicans minimized the significance of the move. “They’re not giving up a whole lot. The tax they wanted to implement on business owners was something that couldn’t pass the House and couldn’t pass the Senate,” McConnell said in a CNBC interview. Jettisoning the tax could also...