What's wrong with a year?

Across the country Wednesday, finger-wagging headlines made declarations such as “House GOP votes to reject extension” of the current payroll tax holiday.

A lot of people probably wondered why Republicans were suddenly against tax cuts, but guess what? They weren’t.

Yes, they voted against the plan passed by the Senate to extend the payroll tax holiday for two months after Jan. 1. But that’s because they supported, and already voted to approve legislation that would provide a YEAR-long extension.

Yet according to most of the stories we’ve seen, it is the House Republicans who are to blame for taxes going up.

It doesn’t make sense, especially when you realize that the House is still in session waiting for the joint conference with the Senate that could put together a compromise, and the Senate is long gone.

Yep, the Senate Democrats, with the help of a lot of Republicans, passed their quick fix and high-tailed it out of the Capitol for Christmas break, thinking that they had left the House no choice but to go along with the usual Band-Aid approach to fiscal policy.

It leaves us scratching our heads, and makes us marvel at the ability of Washington politicians to turn anything — no matter how simple and straightforward — into a conundrum.

But if you forget the spin coming out of Washington, and look at the facts for yourself, it should not be hard to assess which legislation makes more sense for the country.

In our opinion, the House version is hands-down better, because it is aimed in a principled way at providing some clarity and predictability for employers and workers across the country.

The Senate bill, by contrast, is cynically aimed at providing some cushion to allow for more haggling, bickering and horse trading in later negotiations that, who knows, might fall through or lead to another two-month extension. In other words, it would lead to even more uncertainty, and the public has to be getting sick of that.

The House GOP leadership has taken a stab at telling their side of the story, but they seem to be having a hard time getting prominent press play for their position. The online political publication, “The Hill,” for instance, only gave House Majority Leader Eric Cantor one brief line to defend the House position as providing workers and employers more certainty.

“Frankly, that’s the only issue on which we differ with the Senate,” he said.

A lot more could be said about the uncertainty that currently exists for businesses in this country and how two-month-long tax policies are probably pretty bad tax policies. You could read, for instance, the words of the non-partisan National Payroll Reporting Consortium, which represents organizations that provide payroll processing services to 1.5 million employers.

“Many payroll systems are not likely to be able to make such a substantial programming change before January or even February,” said a consortium spokesman. “The systems affected tend to be highly complex, normally requiring at least 90 days for a change of this magnitude for software testing alone, not to mention analysis, design, coding and implementation.”

Of course, the line of thinking among Washington Democrats is that the two-month extension will result in negotiations to provide a longer-term solution. But why trim one year down to two months in the first place?

Are employers supposed to be at the ready to change their payroll systems every couple of months just to match the whims of our national legislators? Well, really, they have no choice. In fact, the only thing that isn’t uncertain in D.C. these days is just why Congress has such a low approval rating among the American people.