Jobs 

Only 8 Percent of Small Firms Believe They Can Expand Now:  According to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), only 8 percent of small business owners surveyed in February 2012 said that they viewed the next six months as a good time to expand their business and hire new employees.  In addition, the net percent of business owners expecting better business conditions in six months from now was down 3 points from the previous month and 15 percentage points lower than last year’s reading.

Spending

The House Rejects the President’s Budget 0-414:  Last week, the House cast a bipartisan and unanimous vote to reject President Obama’s budget for 2013. 175 Democrats joined 239 Republicans to oppose the president’s faulty plan by a vote of 0-414. President Obama’s irresponsible budget refuses to confront our nation’s most pressing challenges and would further hamstring our economy with record spending and the largest tax increase in history on small businesses across the nation.  The $1.9 trillion tax increase proposed in his budget will make it harder for businesses to create jobs and for workers to spur economic growth.

Medicare

 We Cannot Tax Our Way Out:  In a recent issue of Reason, Mercatus Center Research Fellow Veronique de Rugy explains “the bottom line is that the debt problem in the United States will not go away as long as we don’t reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  The coming explosion in entitlement spending will blow apart any possibility of an equilibrium between revenue (no matter how high marginal tax rates get) and expenditures.”