Deal or No Deal on Stimulus?

By Mark Riley

Did the Senate pull our collective leg last Friday when they said there was a deal on President Obama's stimulus plan?


If so, why are so many Republicans, from Congressman Mike Pence to Senator John McCain still badmouthing it?

It's the same blah blah blah... it costs to much... and tax cuts are the answer. I guess they didn't see the news that 600,000 jobs were lost last month.


President Obama did. That's why he's hit the road, holding a town hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana. That's a city where the unemployment rate stands at better than 15%. It's a good bet most of those people, like most Americans now out of work, did their jobs every day until the plant closed.

Meaning, of course, that calls for personal responsibility are likely to fall on deaf ears. Telling a laid off worker it's his or her fault rather than high flying bankers who still don't miss tee times at their golf clubs simply won't work.

That's what Republican obstructionists fail to understand. They're coming across as far more sympathetic to the plight of financial institutions than they are to the needs of the American people.

President Obama will also hold a prime time news conference at the White House. Part of that will be taken up with questions about the tax troubles of a few of his nominees. There will also be questions about the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) plan to shore up American banking.

Yet the big issue is the stimulus.


Is there a deal in the Senate, and when will it come to his desk to be signed? And why has it taken so long?

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?