Republicans ponder small-business plan

Republicans in the U.S. House aren’t rushing to embrace a small-business tax break included in their campaign platform last year.

The proposal, which would provide a 20 percent deduction for companies with 500 or fewer employees, wasn’t included in a jobs plan released today by House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

The spending plan that House Republicans passed in April included language giving lawmakers budgetary room to advance the concept. Republican leaders haven’t introduced separate legislation to enact it.

Representative Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he wanted to consider the idea as part of a broader overhaul of the tax code. Without ruling out a special deduction for small businesses, he called for a rewrite of the tax code to lower rates and eliminate special tax breaks.

“We will incorporate tax relief for small business in our fundamental tax reform package that will be comprehensive,” Camp, a Michigan Republican, said today in Washington when asked about the omission of the small-business proposal. “What we’re looking at is having as low a rate as possible with as few exceptions, deductions, provisions, tax expenditures, preferences that we can have in the bill for simplicity, for certainty.”

The proposal in the 2010 campaign pledge was based on legislation Camp wrote that would provide a 20 percent deduction for two years.

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