Senate Battles Over Bush Tax Cuts

WASHINGTON -- Republicans and Democrats staged an election-year joust in the Senate on Tuesday over the Bush administration's tax cuts for capital gains and dividends, The Associated Press reported.

The battle began when Democrats decided to use a routine procedure that sends the bill into final negotiations to make political points about President Bush's insistence on continuing tax cuts for investors. Republicans matched each Democratic motion one-for-one. None of the votes bound negotiators who will hammer out the final version of the legislation.

The House version of the bill features a two-year extension of the reduced tax rates for capital gains and dividends. They're scheduled to disappear at the end of 2008.

The Senate version omits that extension, even though Senate GOP leaders want the final bill to preserve tax cuts for investors. The key element in the Senate bill prevents millions of taxpayers this year from owing the alternative minimum tax, a trap for wealthy tax dodgers that increasingly hits the middle class.

In the first pair of motions, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 53-47 to include both matters in the final bill. The Senate then voted 53-47 to reject a Democratic effort to exclude capital gains and dividends from the final bill.

-- NYSSCPA.org News Staff

Posted on 2/14/06