They also wrote a payroll system for a business.
"Needless to say, Senator Hatch is deeply disappointed that the majority leader has abandoned a genuine bipartisan compromise only hours after it was unveiled in favor of business-as-usual, partisan gamesmanship," said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch, who helped write a provision suspending the payroll tax for companies that hire out-of-work people.
WASHINGTON — Members of a House-Senate committee charged with writing a measure to extend a payroll tax reduction said Wednesday that their work was done, just shy of an hour before their deadline to get a bill ready for a Friday vote.
WASHINGTON — Members of a House-Senate committee charged with writing a measure to extend a payroll tax reduction and provide added unemployment benefits reached a tentative agreement Tuesday evening, with Republicans and Democrats claiming a degree of political victory in a fight with significant election-year implications.
Republicans say they have written a compromise bill that helps minimum wage earners but also provides benefits to the businesses that must bear the increased payroll costs.
Billy Harwood had been away -- nearly seven years, for writing phony payroll checks from the family pizza business to buy crack.
You might (as some readers wrote to me) think that a payroll tax cut is not, by itself, a good reason for employers to hire, and on that basis conclude that my estimate is way off.
As the primary means of writing programs, storing data, running a payroll and issuing checks, they became a symbol of big-company automation and government bureaucracy ("Do not fold, spindle or mutilate").
Charles Blahous, Mr. Bush's adviser on the issue, recently wrote that the payroll tax cut and the extension that Mr. Obama initially proposed would reduce revenues to Social Security more over two years than Mr. Bush's plan would have over its first decade.
As my colleague Floyd Norris wrote, government payrolls have been shrinking for several years.
