(KCPW News) Tuesday night, the U.S. House of Representatives gave final approval to a Senate bill that would keep America from going over the so called ‘Fiscal Cliff”; which would have meant an average of $2,000 in tax hikes for average families. Utah’s only Democrat in Congress, Jim Matheson, voted against the proposed plan saying the bill doesn’t go far enough.
‘If we could not pass legislation that has a significant, real and serious mechanism to deal with the fiscal imbalances that we face, then I could not support the bill,” Matheson told KCPW. “I support some of the provisions that are in it, but what this measure did was address some issues and then kicked the can down the road on other issues.”
Matheson says even if Congress had not come to a compromise, he does not believe the tax increases that would have followed would have been permanent.
“They wouldn’t have stayed up for the whole calendar year 2013,” Matheson said. “Congress has the ability to retroactively reduce those taxes back to January 1. I think the pressure of the taxes had to be part of the discussion in terms of the bigger bargain. This bill, in fact, is what a lot of people are calling the lowest common denominator that could be reached and it avoided taking on a lot of the bigger issues.”
Senator Orrin Hatch was the only member of the Utah delegation who voted in favor of the fiscal cliff legislation. He was not available for comment.
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