Why the Fighting Over Stimulus?

By Mark Riley

The Senate may well take up President Obama's stimulus package before this day is out. One hesitates to put a price tag on it, because it changes depending on what media you consume. Anyway, a number of senators seem top be bent on trimming what they consider to be unnecessary spending from the bill.


That may be all well and good. It's also interesting that the effort to cut the money is bipartisan. And certainly no one wants to waste money, right? More on that later. Senators Ben Nelson and Susan Collins, both centrists, say they'd like to trim $50 to $200 billion dollars from the package.

So where do they want to cut? $50 million for the arts, $14 million from a Homeland Security initiative, $1 billion from the National Science Foundation, $400 million from research into sexually transmitted diseases, $850 million destined for Amtrak, and $400 million for climate change research.

Fantastic! Trouble is, unless my math is really bad, those proposed cuts don't come anywhere near the $50 to $200 billion these folks want to see trimmed. That would mean more delay and haggling, when delay is the worst thing that could happen to the American people.

New claims for unemployment benefits are at the highest rate since 1982.


The January employment report is due tomorrow, and no one is expecting good news. All due respect to Senators Collins and Nelson (and their allies in this cutting fever), if they can't come up with more than the approximately $2.8 billion they've suggested, they need to move out of the way.

Maybe they're trying to prevent what happened with the financial bailout from happening here. The chair of the group overseeing that money says Uncle Sam overpaid for stocks and other assets to the tune of $80 billion dollars.

Yet isn't President Obama's package an investment in the American people? How about getting it done this week?