Obama’s Budget Will Rebuild Economy on a Solid Foundation
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A new ad (see video) backing President Obama’s budget blueprint hit the airwaves today as Senate and House budget committees unveiled their spending resolutions. Those resolutions followed much of the administration’s outline but made significant changes in some priorities.
Yet while Democratic leaders of the congressional budget panels offered alternatives to the changes they seek in the administration’s proposal, Republican lawmakers sit on the sidelines, offering no alternative, just the par-for-the-course carping criticism that has come to mark their opposition.
The new ad by Americans United for Change—a coalition of unions including the AFL-CIO, community, environmental, progressive and other groups—urges viewers to call Congress to support Obama’s budget because it:
…will rebuild our economy on a solid foundation. Jobs, health care, education, clean energy reform. On this foundation we can build real, long-term economic prosperity for all Americans.
Economists: Stimulus Package Needed Now
The nation’s economy is in a free fall without a parachute, and Congress needs to act quickly to pass President Obama’s recovery package to begin to reverse the economic spiral, three prominent economists said.
During a press conference today, the economists made it clear that Congress should get over its partisan wrangling and pass a bill that increases spending and puts Americans back to work. Americans United for Change and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) hosted the press conference call.
(Click here to urge your senators to support the president’s economic recovery package.)
Recovery Bill ‘Good News for the Economy’
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an economic recovery package to create and save up to 4 million jobs and stabilize the nation’s rapidly tumbling economy. The bill passed without a single Republican vote, despite President Barack Obama’s White House and Capitol Hill meetings with Republican lawmakers in an outreach effort to set a more bipartisan tone in Washington.
The Republicans offered their vision of a recovery plan—tax cuts, mostly for Big Business.
On the House floor during debate on the bill, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, described Republican opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this way:
I must say that I truly admire the courage of my friends on the other side of the aisle. In the middle of the worst economic downturn that any of us can remember, our parents told us about the Depression, an unprecedented and accelerating job loss all across the American economy in every sector, our friends on the other side of the aisle ask us just for one last time to do what they’ve been doing the last eight years; to just one more time give the tax cuts to the richest people in the country; to just one more time dive into the tank of fiscal irresponsibility.
