WASHINGTON (AFX) - Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said the Bush administration could support making a portion of its proposed tax cut retroactive to last year, in order to provide a short-term stimulus to the economy.
"President (George W Bush) has said that we would look forward to working with Congress to provide meaningful stimulus money this year," O'Neill said in an interview on CNN.
He added that "the most desirable notion" would be an early introduction of Bush's proposed marginal income tax rate cuts, "made retroactive to the beginning of this year, or maybe even to the beginning of the year 2000."
While today's budget proposal by the administration did not include an immediate tax cut stimulus, O'Neill repeated that the Bush team is willing to work with Congress to determine how to "put some stimulus out there right away."
He also repeated his recent assessments that the U.S. is not in a recession, but rather a period of "low, moderate level of real growth."
When asked about last week's report that the U.S. lost 86,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in March, O'Neill said the current 4.3 pct unemployment rate is still a "remarkable rate."
Noting the current U.S. corporate earnings season, he also said "some of the early earnings numbers have been quite good."
O'Neill said recent rules implemented by the Security and Exchange Commission that force companies to release the same information to reporters as well as analysts could have had an impact on current earnings.
Companies "are no longer having the quiet conversations with the analysts' community. When it looks like there's going to be any change in what was forecast, they (now) dump it into the market," he said.
"I think that's different from where we've been," he said, concluding that "it's not clear to me that, in fact, the earnings are different, but the process of announcing earnings seems to be different because of the SEC (rules)."