House fails to give tax break to Delphi’s salaried retirees

What Congress was willing to piggyback onto the omnibus budget bill it passed last week says volumes about that body. But what the House stripped from the bill gives Americans reason to question just which people the People’s House is representing.

We’re thinking specifically about the House’s removal from the bill of an extension to the Health-Coverage Tax Credit that is especially important to people in the Mahoning Valley. It provided financial assistance to the Delphi salaried retirees who lost sizeable parts of their pensions and their health-care coverage in the General Motors restructuring of 2009. About 20,000 Delphi workers across the nation, 5,000 in Ohio and 1,500 in the Mahoning Valley were affected.

The tax credit also benefited other workers forced into early retirement when the companies they worked for moved or failed. Among those locally were steelworkers at RG Steel LLC in Warren, which went bankrupt in 2012.

The credits allowed displaced workers tax credits up to 70 percent of what they paid for health coverage. A family plan that provided benefits similar to those Delphi workers had received from the company could cost as much as $3,000 a month, according to a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan.

From a local economic viewpoint, that’s an important government benefit, because it not only makes coverage for thousands of Valley residents affordable, but it frees disposable income for those retirees’ families, and that fuels the local economy.

Ryan, D-Howland, says the credit provided hundreds of dollars a month for those Delphi families. Opponents of the tax credits can’t fall back on the argument that the cost of the credits had to be paid for with other cuts, because Ryan says the bill contained “a lot of tax extenders for companies ... and none of those were paid for.”

Ohio’s two senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Portman, succeeded in getting the extension into the Senate bill, but it died in the House.

Perplexing

That’s what we find perplexing, because the Ohio Republican delegation, including House Speaker John Boehner, has gone on record unanimously a number of times in support of the Delphi salaried retirees in their fight with the Obama administration over their pensions.

And House Republicans have argued for years that allowing other tax cuts to expire amounted to tax increases. Apparently that philosophy applies to the nation’s most prosperous taxpayers, but not to middle class Americans who have lost their jobs relatively late in life and through no fault of their own.

And while Boehner is never at a loss to give lip service to the plight of Delphi retirees, when it came time to include their tax credits in a bill that included 50 other special tax provisions, the speaker just couldn’t do it. Maybe Boehner will correct that in the new Congress, when he has even more power. But Delphi retirees shouldn’t hold their breath.