Congressman Roscoe Bartlett Focuses on Common Ground in President Obama's Joint Address to Congress about Jobs

Press Release

Congressman Roscoe Bartlett attended the Joint Address to Congress by President Obama on September 8, 2011. He said afterward, "Americans can't afford to wait 14 months for the President and the Congress to agree on steps that we can take to reduce the government barriers to job creation."

He noted, "I wrote down a long list of things during the President's jobs speech tonight that I agree with. We should focus on our areas of agreement and move forward to get those done. One of these things is that we should reduce taxes on American businesses that create jobs in the United States. That sounded like the bipartisan bill that I am working on with Congresswoman Donna Edwards, the 21st Century Investment Act of 2011, H.R. 689. America's taxation of businesses is so onerous compared to competing countries in Europe, Asia and South America that we're driving research and jobs overseas. Passage of H.R. 689 would be a positive step to modernize our incentives to reward technological innovation and manufacturing by small businesses here in Maryland and elsewhere in the United States."

Congressman Bartlett said that there were three things that he found mainly missing in the President's speech that need to be done to encourage job creation: working with Republicans to reform and eliminate regulations that are impeding job creation; providing tax certainty so that businesses can plan and reducing the corporate tax rate in the U.S. which is among the highest in the world and much higher than most of our competitors.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source