Leader Boehner: Featured Blogger

“Stimulus” Should Unleash America’s Potential – Not Government’s Appetite for Pork

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported more troubling news that the American economy is falling deeper into recession. In January, nearly 600,000 Americans lost their jobs, bringing the unemployment rate to 7.6% and the total number of jobs lost since the recession began to 3.6 million. These are troubling numbers. American families are hurting, businesses are closing, and more jobs are in jeopardy. The American people are looking to Washington for leadership to get the economy moving again – and so far, Congress has let them down.

When President Obama called on Congress to produce bipartisan legislation focused on immediate job creation and fast-acting tax relief, the Democratic controlled Congress responded by passing a trillion-dollar spending bill focused on slow and wasteful spending that won’t create jobs. In the end, the only thing bipartisan about the bill the House passed was the opposition to it. All 177 Republicans and 11 of our Democratic colleagues voted against the “stimulus” package.

Republicans and Democrats have asked questions about the “stimulus” package that the Democratic leadership has been unable to answer:

How is $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts or $650 million for digital-TV coupons going to move Americans out of the unemployment line?

How will spending $20 million for the removal of fish passage barriers, or $85 million for polar icebreakers, or millions of dollars for global warming research put struggling workers back to work?

Some estimate that nearly three-fourths (70 percent) of the spending in the House-passed bill is “non-stimulative” and won’t create jobs. The Congressional Budget Office says that most of the money in the $1 trillion bill won’t be spent until after 2010, when many economists believe the economy will already be on the road to recovery.

And of course there’s a more fundamental question: how are we going to PAY for all this new spending?

The metric that the President’s Director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, has used to describe what a successful economic recovery package would look like is one House Republicans agree with: it should be “timely, targeted, and temporary.” Congressional Democrats have failed on all three counts. In baseball, that would be a strikeout.

Between the “stimulus” spending package and other spending ambitions held by the Democratic Party, “it seems likely that the deficit for this year will approach $1.7 trillion,” American Enterprise Institute scholar Kevin Hassett notes. “If your family income in 2006 was between $75,000 and $100,000, the extra taxes that you will have to pay at some point in the future [as a result of the additional borrowing by Congress] add up to about $14,000,” Mr. Hassett says.

The hundreds of billions of dollars Washington is borrowing to finance this pork-barrel monstrosity will come from our children and grandchildren. This is not “stimulus” – it’s generational theft.

On the opening day of the 111th Congress, I pledged that the House Republicans wouldn’t just be the party of “opposition,” but the party of “better solutions.” The President asked for Republican input on his proposed “stimulus” initiative. In response, I asked Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Republican Whip, to convene a “solutions group” on the economic recovery effort to craft some recommendations that could be considered by the President.

The Cantor-led solutions group came up with a “smarter, simpler” plan. Our plan would create twice the jobs at half the cost as the Democrats’ “stimulus.” It has five components: 1) Immediate Tax Relief for Working Families, 2) Help for America’s Small Businesses, 3) No Tax Increases to Pay for Spending, 4) Assistance for the Unemployed, and 5) Stabilizing Home Values.

Our solution is quite different from the plan written by Congressional Democrats. It recognizes that the engine that drives the American economy is the American people – not government spending. Freeing up Americans to invest, save, and spend more of their own money is at the core of our proposal.

As I said on the opening day of the current Congress, America’s potential is unlimited; government’s potential is not. We must not confuse the two. We can’t simply spend our way back to prosperity. Our responsibility as elected leaders in a flagging economy is to craft policies that allow our country’s potential to be unleashed. America runs on freedom. It’s the fuel of our economy and the fuel of our democracy. The more we spend and borrow, the less freedom we and our children and grandchildren will have left.

Our nation is in recession. Families are struggling. We owe the American people a responsible, bipartisan bill that will protect and create American jobs. To date, Congress has failed to get the job done.