The U.S. Senate failed to pass President Barack Obama's American Jobs Act Tuesday evening, as all 46 Republicans and two Democrats voted against the measure, which needed 60 votes to pass.
The plan would have allocated $447 billion to job training programs, infrastructure spending, unemployment extensions and tax breaks for businesses that hire. However, anticipating its defeat, the Obama administration has already vowed to push portions of the bill through Congress separately. Still, it seemed the president has taken personally its unpopularity in Congress.
"Any senator who votes no should have to look you in the eye and tell you what exactly they're opposed to," Bloomberg Businessweek quotes Obama as saying to a union audience in Pittsburgh. "[Next year,] I think they'll have a hard time explaining why they voted no on this bill - other than the fact that I proposed it."
Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's Analytics, had projected that the AJA would have boosted the economy by 2 percentage points while creating some 1.9 million jobs.
Tags : Taxes, Corporate Books, LLC, LP
Posted: Oct 12th, 2011