Parties Confident of Extending Payroll Tax Cut
With both parties largely in agreement on a yearlong extension of President Obama’s payroll tax cut, the fight in Congress over the coming weeks will boil down to how to pay for it, and Democrats appeared to hold the advantage as members of the House returned to Washington on Tuesday.
Senior Democratic aides say they are entering the tax negotiations in a strong position after House Republicans yielded to bipartisan political pressure and passed a two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax cut just before the winter break.
Republicans, eager to avoid another bruising fight, have signaled that they will drop the most controversial provisions in the version of the yearlong extension passed by the House earlier in December. Those include efforts to block environmental regulations on boilers and carbon emissions and to allow states to impose drug tests on recipients of unemployment benefits.
Democrats have retreated from their effort to raise taxes on incomes over $1 million to finance the extension of a tax cut for most working Americans, stave off a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors and extend expiring unemployment benefits. But they do not seem ready to give much more ground.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/18/us/politics/congress-sees-few-barriers-to-extending-payroll-tax-cut.html