What's at stake

Is the President finally getting a backbone on this stimulus thing? Given his recent speech, I think he might be. The way I see it, he tried to play nice with the Republicans (see my earlier post) and what did they do? They all voted no, which is pretty much a big slap in the face! Well, today it seems he's finally putting them in their place...

In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action.

So while our lawmakers are taking their sweet old time as our economy burns, let's take a look at a few meaningful things in this bill that are being held up with their pissing contest:

• $142 billion for a middle-class tax cut
• $47 billion to extend unemployment benefits
• $16 billion to expand food stamps
• $17 billion in one-time payments to low-income Americans
• $26 billion to expand access to health care
• $87 billion to help states pay for Medicaid
• $24 billion to modernized health information technology
• $46 billion to fix bridges and roads
• $80 billion to improve public education
• $19 billion for school construction
• $14 billion to make college more affordable
• $32 billion for clean energy

There's much more. All together, the Obama plan will create or save an estimated 3 to 4 million jobs and keep our nation"s economy from sliding into a lengthy and severe recession. So what is the real reason the GOP is so opposed to this stimulus package? I think the Huffington Post summed it up best...

The GOP does not want Obama or America to move forward, what else can they run on in 4 years?
Why didn't a single House Republican vote for the recovery package? One high-ranking congressional aide opined to the Huffington Post, "It wasn't because of family planning funds or preserving the National Mall or whatever Rush Limbaugh and Drudge's talking points were. It's because this legislation is the clearest repudiation of Bush and Congressional Republican economic policies yet."

It is, in a way, a public relations coup that the stimulus has been boiled down to, as one Hill Democrat puts it, "funding for the arts, funding for the mall, and funding to fight AIDS." Those aspects of the legislation, as the White House points out, constitute a mere 7/100th of one percent of the entire package.

What about jobs being created and long-term savings by the $6.7 billion for energy-efficient renovations and repairs to federal buildings...

"I don't think people realize what a big deal weatherizing the federal buildings would be. The government wastes millions of dollars every year on buildings that are old and need to be weatherized," said a high-ranking Democratic aide. "We have windows that leak and have bad insulation. These are buildings all over the country and we are going to go in there, weatherize them, create jobs and save money down the road."

The Republican ideology and the Bush years have left this country's economy in such a state of collapse that most economists say we have to think big. This is true on a broad level, where the middle-class saw its purchasing power drastically diminished during the past 8 years as their income remained stagnant while productivity and profits grew! The economic growth of the Bush years was funded by debt on the backs of the middle-class. So what if this bill props up dormant federal programs? The policies of the past eight years were hardly stimulative.

"We cannot move forward without understanding what created this crisis," said Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel. "This recovery package is the beginning of a longer-term investment in America's middle class, our small businesses, health care, renewable energy technologies and a new infrastructure to reinvigorate our economy so that American workers and businesses can compete and win in the 21st Century."