Reid: GOP Wants to Help Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton with 'Wasteful Giveaways'

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today on the floor accused Republicans of wanting to support the rich and famous by shielding upper-income brackets from a repeal of tax cuts.

“Congressional Republicans want to lavish huge, across-the-board tax breaks on billionaire hedge fund managers and mega-rich celebrities like Donald Trump,” Reid said.

He said the Republican version of his Small Business Jobs and Tax Relief Act, which passed in the House, “wouldn’t do a thing to encourage hiring.” The $28.5 billion that Reid’s bill costs over a decade isn’t offset by spending cuts.

“More than 99 percent of businesses in America would qualify for this extravagant tax break – even if they didn’t create a single new job or raise wages for one solitary employee,” Reid claimed. “In fact, fabulously rich so-called ‘small business owners’ like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton could qualify for these wasteful giveaways.”

“Even though three-quarters of Americans oppose more tax breaks for wealthiest few, nearly half the benefits of this $46 billion Republican proposal would go to millionaires and billionaires,” Reid continued.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) countered that the tax push was a “distraction” from President Obama’s “nightmarish economic record.”

“The president’s top priority for the past year hasn’t been creating jobs; it’s been saving his own,” McConnell said in a floor speech. “And his advisers seem to think that if they create enough scapegoats, he’ll slip by in November.”

“That’s why he’s spent the past year trying to convince the public that somehow his predecessor is more responsible for the economic failures of the past three and a half years than he is,” McConnell continued. “That all the bailouts and the trillions in borrowed money and the government takeover of health care and the onslaught of bureaucratic red tape and regulations are somehow irrelevant to the fact that we’re mired in the slowest economic recovery in modern times. That we’re just one more stimulus away from an economic boom; that the fact that we’ve had unemployment above eight percent for 41 straight months has nothing to do with the policies he put in place in his first two years in office. That all these massive pieces of legislation he touted were somehow hugely historic, and yet at the same time completely unrelated to the joblessness, uncertainty, and decline we’ve seen almost every day since.”