GREENSBORO - The First-Time Homebuyers Federal Tax Credit is due to expire at the end of next month. In anticipation of this — and to further bolster home sales — Rep. Howard Coble has introduced legislation to not only extend it through all of 2010, but to also make the $8,000 income-tax credit available to all home buyers.

Coble has not been alone in introducing such bills. Other representatives and senators have introduced bills with various forms of extending this tax credit.

“I think there are maybe a total of four or five floating around up there,”

Coble said of proposals to extend this home-buyers tax credit. “One or two are identical to my bill.”

Coble, North Carolina’s Sixth District representative in Congress, feels that the tax-credit extension is needed to bolster the economy.

“The home-building industry is like the automobile industry and others; they’re all on the rocks and shoals of the water,” he said. “I feel like this will be a good chance to stimulate home construction.”

When asked if he thought the homebuyers tax credit would be extended — either through his bill or that of another member of Congress — Coble replied, “I don’t know and I don’t know for this reason: the health-care issue. [Members of Congress have] shoved everything else to the side. So I really don’t know how my bill will do right now. A lot will depend upon the passage of some kind of health-care legislation.”

Coble has let it be known that he is against health-care financial overhaul,“in its present form.”

“I oppose it mainly because of the cost,” Coble said of health-care legislation, currently being banded about in Congress. “The cost is just astronomical. We’re spending money that we don’t have.”

Coble did support, albeit reluctantly, the “Cash for Clunkers” program, that allowed up to $4,500 in rebates to buyers of new automobiles who traded in models with low gasoline-mileage performance.

“I held my nose and voted for it,” he said of the Cash for Clunkers bill. “I felt like motor company owners had inventory up to their eyeballs, and I thought this would be a good way to move some of that inventory.”

Now that the bill has passed and the program expired, the figurative odor

Coble smelled when he voted for the bill has not entirely gone away.

“I think [Cash for Clunkers] was probably a good program if we could fix the administrative foul-up on the delay of paying the automobile dealers,” Coble said. “I am told that that situation is getting better.”

Thursday Coble spoke on the House floor about more complete defunding of

ACORN, an agency that has come under fire after an independent producer caught some of its employees on film in the act of being willing to help people receive federal aid for the purpose of performing illegal activity.

“We have voted to defund ACORN, but they’re still eligible to receive federal money through the stimulus bill,” Coble pointed out to Thomasville Times, six days before his House floor speech on the subject. “I think we have a bill in the hopper now to address that. This bill would make them ineligible to get any kind of [federal] money, because that program has been a rip-off since Day 1.”

Coble used extreme caution to express optimism in the future of the economy.

“I’m reluctant to even say this because your readers may take this out of context,” he said to a Thomasville Times reporter. “I feel that economically, we’re close to have bottomed out, and I think we’ll see improvement. It won’t be tomorrow — and it may not even be this year — but I think it will start to turn up. Hopefully, that will improve the unemployment that plagues us.”