You Either Want Higher Taxes Or Higher Growth. “It comes down to the question, if you want to put a priority on economic recovery, jobs and growth, you ought not to raise taxes. You either want higher taxes or higher growth. That's the bottom line. This insistence that somehow it's just not fair that somebody's not paying enough taxes right now, I think for some it’s a priority. For me and most of us on the Republican side of the aisle, the priority is jobs. We have to win the war on jobs globally and we have to get people back to work here at home. We saw that Ernst and Young put out a study a couple of weeks ago that said the President’s plan, the one that Steny Hoyer supports, will cost the economy over 700,000 jobs.”

The President's Plan Raises Taxes On Small Business. “If we are interested in jobs, let’s not be raising taxes right now. The President's proposal, if you look at it, says that 50 percent of the people that the tax hike applies to are folks that get at least 25 percent of their income from small businesses, which means you're taxing the very people that we want to go out and invest to create jobs. So it just doesn't make sense. It’s counterintuitive to me that anybody would say that.”

The House Has Acted To Restart The Economic Engine. “We believe we can work our way back and start the economic engine in this country again. We've got the talent. We understand that there are more ideas in this country than anywhere else in the world. We have the capital base. We ought to be focused on how we restart the engine, and generate the job growth and get about the investments that this country knows how to do in the private sector. In order to do that, we have to take away the uncertainty in Washington that starts with tackling the fiscal issues, getting entitlements under control and reeling back the overreach on the regulatory side by putting balance back into the equation. We need to make sure agencies take into consideration job growth when they act in a regulatory manner.”

Let's Focus On Job Growth. “Nobody is going to get everything they want. But at least we could say let's focus on job growth. That's the difference and that's the problem with the Senate tax plan they just passed versus what we did in the House yesterday and what we'll do today on the floor. Chairman Camp of the Ways and Means Committee is bringing forward a bill that will lay out a procedure for the tax reform that we insisted upon yesterday in our bill.”