“President Barack Obama urged Congress to back two of the top priorities of U.S. multinational corporations: broader authority for his administration to negotiate trade deals along with changes to immigration laws,” Richard Rubin and Brian Wingfield report for Bloomberg. “Obama’s trade comments, which didn’t endorse a specific proposal, drew rare support from Republicans who have been prodding the president to push harder for the trade deals. Many Democrats say they are skeptical of the so-called fast-track authority for trade deals because of concerns the accords won’t protect U.S. jobs and don’t give lawmakers enough say on them.”
“Obama reprised tax, energy and transportation initiatives he has failed to move through Congress in prior years and then promoted less ambitious policies he can achieve with executive action or more narrowly focused legislation,” Rubin and Wingfield report. “He will bring corporate executives to the White House later this week to discuss hiring long-term unemployed workers, and he announced partnerships with Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Sprint Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. to connect schools to broadband technology.”
“Obama supports lowering the corporate tax rate and curtailing tax breaks, then using any one-time revenue generated by those changes to pay for bridges, transit and other infrastructure,” Rubin and Wingfield report. “That plan has stalled in Congress, stymied by a partisan dispute over whether wealthy individuals should pay more and whether the one-time money should be used for rate cuts… On immigration, Obama reiterated his call for Congress to pass legislation to change the nation’s ‘broken’ system this year, allowing companies to better access labor resources… ‘Our immigration system is in desperate need of reform,’ Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. ‘However, we don’t need another massive, Obamacare-like bill that is full of surprises and dysfunction after it becomes law.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]