Congress should spend its lame-duck session passing an R&D tax credit...

lame-duck session will last three weeks and will be dominated by budget issues as well as discussion of extending the expiring Bush tax cuts, said TechAmerica President Phil Bond. Odds are improving for a temporary extension of some tax cuts, he said, since a slow economy is a bad time to raise rates. Reinstating the R&D credit should be a “no-brainer,” said Bond, noting that the loss of the credit threatens 100,000 jobs. He also predicted that passage of a comprehensive cybersecurity bill will be more difficult next year because Congress will be divided. Current bills in the Senate will not pass during the lame duck but a limited bill revamping FISMA and establishing data breach provisions has bipartisan support and could pass, Bond said. There are provisions to overhaul FISMA in the 2010 Department of Defense authorization bill in the House, he added, and a similar provision in S-3480, the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill. Bond said he’s hopeful that Congress will pass something during the lame duck. He gave mixed reviews to President Barack Obama’s tech agenda in the first two years of his term. The industry appreciates that the president has promoted high tech but disagrees with him about taxes, Bond said. He said Obama has performed much better on matters such as broadband and spectrum issues that he has more control over than Congress than he has on others.