Taxpayers Win Three Times Over in Defeat of S. 782

The U.S. Senate voted 51-49 today against proceeding to final passage of S. 782, a bill which would increase spending on a Great Society-era community activist government slush fund. The Senate Republican leadership wanted senators to be able to vote on several amendments to improve the bill. Chief among these was an amendment by Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) which would end the ethanol mandate and kill the death tax. When paired with the Feinstein-Coburn amendment (passed last week) which eliminated the ethanol tax credit and tariff, these two mendments would have gotten the government permanently out of the ethanol preference business. Without the DeMint amendment, S. 782 was a triple loser for taxpayers: 1. It spent taxpayer dollars on liberal community activist groups emulating ACORN 2. It ignored the ethanol mandate. The ethanol mandate is the true impetus spurring non-free market ethanol consumption, since it alone is responsible for most government-induced production of ethanol. 3. S. 782 as amended would have been scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation as a net tax increase, giving even more money to the Appropriation Committees to spend on Obama's super-sized government...more