McConnell: Stop Spending Money to Help the Unemployed
President Obama is speaking this morning at the Brookings Institution to outline his strategy for tackling the employment crisis. Before he spoke a word, Republican leaders were already attacking the news that the administration is eyeing TARP funds to pay the tab for the new stimulus bill.
“This is not only irresponsible, since the purpose of these emergency funds was to prop up the credit system in the midst of a crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the chamber floor Tuesday. “It also violates both current law and the pledge we made that every dollar we got back would be returned to the taxpayer to reduce the national debt.”
“„This proposal is completely wrongheaded, but it’s perfectly illustrative of the way Democrats in Congress have been dealing with taxpayer money all year — by throwing it at one problem after another without much regard for the consequences. Whether it’s the Stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, or the health care bill that’s currently on the floor, Americans are running out of patience with politicians who promise jobs, but who deliver nothing but more debt, higher taxes, and longer unemployment lines.
Ignored in this critique is the inconvenient Congressional Budget Office finding that the stimulus bill has saved or created 1.6 million jobs this year, with a great deal of the money still left to be spent. Of course, the Republicans this year have already made evident the degree to which they’re concerned for the unemployed, delaying the recently passed unemployment insurance extension for the entire month of October while 7,000 people a day exhausted their benefits.
