133,000 Ohioans Get Jobs, Despite Boehner Tantrum Over Recovery Bill

by Mike Hall, Feb 17, 2009

The economic recovery bill signed by President Obama this afternoon in Denver is the same bill that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) literally trashed by throwing it on the floor of the U.S. House on Friday during a debate tantrum against the bill.

His anger was directed at a bill that will create or save 133,000 jobs in Boehner’s Buckeye State, provide tax cuts for 4.5 million Ohioans and boost unemployment benefits for 666,000 jobless workers in the state. The bill has similar impacts on all states and nationally creates or saves 3.5 million jobs.

But Boehner, along with every House Republican and all but three Senate Republicans, loudly and vehemently heaped scorn on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. They obviously don’t give a whit about the tens of millions of Americans who are jobless, facing foreclosure or loss of their health care. Apparently, bipartisanship is defined as “my way or no way” in the lexicon of Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

These are the same lawmakers—along with the Bush administration’s crack economic team—who crashed the nation’s economy with their tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and free-rein deregulation of banks, mortgage companies and the financial world that brought us secret hedge funds and incomprehensible derivatives.

Here’s just some of what the Boehner-McConnell gang find so distasteful in the $787 billion recovery package:

• The 3.5 million jobs created or saved by rebuilding America, including new “green jobs” that will boost the nation’s energy independence and global competitiveness.
• The 95 percent of American workers who get an immediate tax cut.
• Investments in roads, bridges, mass transit, energy-efficient buildings, flood control, clean water projects and other shovel-ready projects that quickly create jobs.
• Financial aid to states to keep cops on the beat, teachers in the classroom and clinic doors open.
• Help for jobless workers to maintain their health care coverage, put more money in their unemployment checks and food on the table with increased money for the food stamp program.
• Investments in steel and other U.S. made products, thanks to Buy American provisions in the bill. (For a complete look at the bill, click here.)

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee says the package:

Delivers on the change we voted for in November….We have taken the first step in putting our country and economy back on track.

During the monthlong debate on the bill, Obama made an unprecedented effort to reach out to Republicans in Congress, inviting them to the White House and traveling to Capitol Hill to listen to their concerns and suggestions. Several of their suggestions on taxes were incorporated into the package. But their vitriolic attacks against the bill did not cease.

Today The New York Times reported that Obama’s attempt at bipartisanship may have been slapped away by congressional Republicans, but it’s been embraced by some Republican leaders who live a little closer to the economic disaster scene—the state governors.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) showed some common sense when he told the Times why the recovery package is a lifeline:

It helps us meet the needs of the people in a very difficult economic time….Whether it’s teachers or people on road crews helping our infrastructure, those in the health care arena as it might relate to Medicaid, all of these areas are important, all of them can produce jobs. Regardless of what your party is, Republican or Democrat, it really doesn’t matter. We have a duty and an obligation to the people who elected us, no matter what our position happens to be, to work together to get through this thing.

Can you imagine Boehner uttering anything so practical? Or, how about this from Vermont Gov. Jim Douglass (R), who seems to have a better grasp on bipartisan give and take than McConnell. Douglass admits the bill “might be a little different” if he had written it:

But the essence of a recovery package is essential to get our nation’s economy moving.

United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo W. Gerard has a theory on what’s behind the fierce congressional and think-tank Republican opposition to a bill that’s clearly intended to reach out to working families—it just might prove them and their whole anti-government philosophy wrong. He writes on the USW blog:

The GOP made it malevolently clear during their majority years in the Bush administration that they opposed anything that would strengthen America’s middle class…

Republicans are terrified of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act because if it works, if it creates jobs and helps stimulate the economy, then Americans will think good thoughts about government action and spending.

And that could lead to new public support for government payments for important social safety net programs like health care.

When that happens, it will be proof that the trickle-down, tax cut, deregulation economic policies of the past are as reliable as the 3 a.m. infomercial products the TV slicksters shill.

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