beats by dre (AP) WASHINGTON — In an abrupt about-face, House GOP leaders announced Monday that they are willing to extend the two percentage point cut in the payroll tax through the end of the year and add the approximately $100 billion cost to the nation’s $15 trillion-plus debt.House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy of California said the House could vote on the payroll tax measure this week, but that the fate of unemployment benefits for millions of the long-term jobless and efforts to forestall a scheduled cuts in fees to doctors who treat Medicare patients would remain in the hands of a House-Senate negotiating panel that’s looking for ways to pay for them.The GOP statement came after intense talks this weekend failed to produce an agreement. Republicans were pressing for pay cuts for federal workers and requiring them to contribute more to their pensions. They recoiled at a Democratic proposal to raise Transportation Security Administration per-ticket airline security fees.”Democrats’ refusal to agree to any spending cuts in the conference committee has made it necessary for us to prepare this fallback option to protect small business job creators and ensure taxes don’t go up on middle-class workers,” the GOP leadership statement said.
dre beats Without action by Congress by the end of the month, payroll taxes will rise for 160 million Americans. The two percentage point tax cut delivers about $20 a week to a worker making $50,000 a year and a tax cut totaling $2,000 this year for someone making a $100,000 salary.Democrats were encouraged and said the development could break an impasse over the payroll tax proposal and the other expiring provisions.”We’ve been making the point that when (it comes to) tax cuts for folks at the very top, the House Republicans went to great lengths to change their rules to say you don’t have to pay for those,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “And yet they’ve been saying that when it comes to a short-term, 10-month payroll tax cut for middle-income people all of a sudden you have to pay for it.”"This is a major step forward in these negotiations,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.But Democrats also warned that decoupling the payroll tax from the larger legislation could jeopardize efforts to renew the jobless benefits and the fix to the Medicare payment formula.”It’s completely irresponsible to leave behind nearly five million unemployed Americans whose benefits will expire and 47 million seniors and disabled Americans whose access to health care would be jeopardized,” said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., a member of the 20-lawmaker House-Senate negotiating panel.
beats by dr dre “There is no reason all three of these priorities cannot proceed at the same time,” said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.The GOP move reflects a desire by party leaders to avoid a political hit if the payroll tax expires at the end of the month. And it would avoid burdening businesses with uncertainties regarding their payroll systems. On the other hand, jobless benefits lapsed for several weeks in 2010, and delays in adopting a so-called Medicare “doc’s fix” can be dealt with by delaying the processing of Medicare claims.”It is prudent for our leadership to take whatever action is necessary to ensure American workers are not hit with a tax increase on March 1,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., the lead GOP negotiator.The White House did not embrace the House leadership idea.”We are willing to work with them to offset it in a responsible way,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. “And we expect Congress to get its work done and to extend it — the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and the doc fix.”The move by the GOP leadership still would leave it to negotiators to come up with $30 billion or $40 billion in deficit savings to extend jobless benefits averaging about $300 a week to people who have been out of work for more than six months. Republicans have pressed to cut the number of weeks from the maximum 99 permitted under current policies and economic conditions down to as few as 59 weeks. They also are pressing to require people receiving unemployment to enroll in GED classes and allow states to condition benefits on the passage of drug tests.
cheap beats by dre WASHINGTON — Bathed in the candlelight of a Romanesque Texas church and framed at the altar by golden stained glass, Rick Santorum told a group of Dallas-area pastors Wednesday that he saw no boundary between faith and public life and that he “could not and would not leave my faith at the door” as he sought the presidency.Then, as if in thanks, the pastors in the Bella Donna Adriatica Chapel in McKinney, Texas, gathered around Santorum in the church’s central aisle for a laying-on of hands. “Get a hand on Rick, or get a hand on someone who has a hand on Rick,” said the host.Surrounding him like a pious rugby scrum, they prayed that God would direct the former Pennsylvania senator’s steps as he seeks the Republican nomination.(Watch the church meeting below)Santorum is the all-but-official GOP “church” candidate at a time when church-state issues are raging. While he has been largely relegated to the background since a surprisingly strong showing in Iowa, Santorum’s three-state victory Tuesday night made it clear the Republican base hasn’t forgotten that.To be sure, Santorum isn’t merely a religious candidate, praying on the altar of public life. Yesterday he won every county in Missouri, not just ones with evangelicals and conservative Catholics in them. He also won in Minnesota and Colorado, administering what a Santorum aide rightly called “a good ol’ fashioned country horse whippin’” to Mitt Romney.
beats by dre studio Santorum is passionate about manufacturing, and advertises his working-class heritage as the grandson of a Pittsburgh-area coal miner. Polls show that, with his sweater vests and reluctance to run negative ads (perhaps making a virtue of his lack of funds), he has emerged as the most likeable candidate in the field — proving once again that politics is a game of comparison.There were no media entrance or exit polls in any of the three contests Tuesday, but Santorum’s victories can’t be entirely coincidental in a media environment dominated by three issues roiling evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics — two groups that drove Santorum’s win in Iowa.The political news these days is not dominated by economics or foreign policy. Instead, the headlines and emotion stem from:the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision — and then reversal of its decision — to deny funding to Planned Parenthoo.the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to invalidate the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 in Californiaperhaps most provocatively, the Obama Administration’s decision to mandate that church-owned hospitals offer contraceptive services as part of their employees’ benefit packages.
beats solo Taken together, the three events have provoked pushback from Christian and other religious conservatives, especially but not limited to Catholics. And their indignation is an emotion that politicians, especially Republicans, are racing to exploit from the Capitol to the campaign.The timing and circumstances were especially good for Santorum. Turnout in the three states was low, which likely helped Santorum because of his ties to passionately motivated evangelical and Catholic voters.And none of Santorum’s three remaining rivals can play the faith role as convincingly as he does: not former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, because he is a Mormon; not Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), because the gold standard is his Holy Grail; and not former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), because his recent conversion to Catholicism came after two adulterous affairs and three marriages. South Carolina evangelicals were willing to overlook that Newtonian history. Others aren’t.Santorum, by contrast, is a lifelong Catholic and former altar boy who home schooled his kids to avoid what he regarded as the secular corrosion of public education. He has made social issues such as abortion, creationism and gay marriage the essence of his legislative and political identity for decades.”All of the other candidates have the same stands on these issues as Rick does,” said Hogan Gidley, Santorum’s national communications director. “So why are voters who care about those issues now going for Rick and not for them? Because they like him, they believe him, and they trust him because of his record.”
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