Sense of House Regarding any Final Measure to Extend Certain Expiring Provisions
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, some have suggested that we're choosing between 1 year and 2 months. The fact is that by rejecting the Senate bill, which would have created certainty for 2 months, we are instead replacing that with uncertainty that begins in 2 weeks. Going the direction we're going in, in 2 weeks we won't know what the situation will be for payrolls that start on the 1st of January.
A full-year consideration is not going to be achieved in the next 2 weeks. The doc fix we've been working on for years; unemployment compensation and tax policy we've been working on for a long time. The idea that we're going to appoint a conference committee and they're going to meet and agree and figure all of this stuff out in a couple of days, we tried that with the supercommittee. It didn't work. This little conference committee is not going to solve all of these problems in the next 10 days.
So we have a choice: 2 months of certainty or a few days of total uncertainty. Who knows what's going to happen.
Economists have said if we don't extend the payroll tax and unemployment compensation that it will have significant adverse effects on the economy.
So we should do this. We should do it for 2 months and work on it for 2 months, and hopefully we'll have a solution at the end of 2 months. We certainly won't have a solution at the end of 2 weeks.
So that's the choice.
When people talk about certainty, this is a group that talked about certainty and then changed the regulations on light bulbs that have been in effect for 4 years on a 2-week notice. Here we are with certainty for 2 months, and they say, well, uncertainty is a problem, so let's do it in 2 weeks.
Let's have some certainty, 2 months of certainty. Let's work on it, and we can get a full-year solution. We're not going to do that the way we're headed.
I would hope, Mr. Speaker, that we would adopt the Senate amendments, leave town, send the bill to the President and be finished with it rather than invite all of this uncertainty which is certainly going to befall us if we don't do that.
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