16 Comments - Carl Nyberg - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 9:20 am: Are Roskam and Kirk opposed to any stimulus bill? Are Roskam and Kirk opposed to working with the Obama administration and Democratic majority to craft a stimulus bill? What kind of stimulus bill do Roskam and Kirk support? If Roskam and Kirk see tax cuts as the solution, could they explain why they think the tax cuts under the Bush administration were insufficient? Under the Bush administration and the Republican Congress the really rich people became richer and controlled a larger percentage of the economy. The United States economy is driven by middle-class spending. Rich people can be rich, but if the middle class isn’t spending money, the economy doesn’t work. If Roskam and Kirk think that letting rich people avoid taxes on investment income is the way to stimulate the economy, they really shouldn’t be in Congress voting on stuff. And if Roskam and Kirk are unwilling to work with Democrats to try to improve the economy then they are putting the partisan interests of the Republican Party ahead of the interests of their constituents. - Redbright - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 9:21 am: Huberman may be the only person Daley still trusts. Seriously. For a decade I’ve been interacting with City officials, including a lot of the Mayor’s direct reports, on NGO projects and there has been a serious increase in the number of times I hear “we can only recommend” that the City departments follow the Mayor’s directive. Got that? The City departments do what they want. If the Streets and San people want to sleep away the day, we saw that there is nothing the Mayor can do – for example. The Mayor’s big green initiative he made much ado about: The City departments can’t be directed to follow it. “It’s a recommendation.” Daley sold his soul to the patronage devil and we are all now paying the fee. I give him credit for recognizing what he has done but he appears not able to reclaim his Mayoral authority. - Six Degrees of Separation - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 9:57 am: Lipinski should be glad that rail and transit is getting such a large share of the stimulus package as it now sits. Roads and highways carry about 98% of the passenger miles in the US, according to the latest available Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And buses (which use roads and highways to carry out their mission) carry three times the passenger miles of their rail transit counterparts. IL roads and highways will get about $990 million (about 65%) and transit and “fixed guideways” will get about $540 million (about 35%) in the House version of the stimulus bill. Not a bad shake for rail passenger and transit, any way you slice it. And I am a supporter of both. - wordslinger - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 10:42 am: It looks like the GOP is going to let the Dems take the rap for the borrowing and printing press crankup at the mint. I would encourage these statesmen to introduce their own stimulus plan, and encourage Reid and Pelosi to allow it to be debated. Is it me, but is the national GOP most comfortable being in the minority in Congress? - jerry 101 - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 10:44 am: Good to know that Kirk and Roskam think the best way to resuscitate the economy is more tax breaks for Bernie Madoff, John Thain, the Merrill Lynch executives who got $4 billion in taxpayer funded bonuses, Bank of America executives who thought it was a good idea to gobble up as many failing banks as they could, Citibank executives who ruined their company, took 20 or 30 billion from the Feds, and then bought a $50 million airplane. Not to mention the Detroit executives who ran their companies into the crapper. Much better to give those people MORE money, they deserve to be rewarded…look at how good of a job they’ve done. Let’s make sure that we don’t put middle and working class people back to work. Better that they run out of unemployment benefits and lose their homes and struggle to survive. We’ve tried tax cuts. George Bush ushered in the biggest tax cuts ever. Where did that get us? The wealthiest getting wealthier and the rest of us treading water for 6 or 7 years. Anemic job creation numbers that barely, if at all, kept pace with workforce size growth, wide-ranging underemployment. More people working part-time than ever. And now, hundreds of thousands of jobs being vaporized. When are those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy going to trickle down again? Get rid of the tax cuts. Add billions more for infrastructure. The Society of Civil Engineers gave our infrastructure a D. Said it’ll cost $2.2 trillion to repair everything. Seems like the stimulus could be a good start. - Leroy - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 10:53 am: >Is it me, but is the national GOP most comfortable being in the minority in Congress? The party in power must spend more money, make things bigger, and make them more complicated. That is their job. The party in the minority has only one job - oppose the party in power. There are only two political parties in the United States - the one trying to gain power, and the one trying to hold on to it. - Six Degrees of Separation - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 11:24 am: jerry 101- also from an IL perspective, think about one of our biggest industries (Caterpillar) laying off 20,000 worldwide. Infrastructure is woven into the fabric of IL, in its function as a distribution and junction point as well as the industries that serve it. - KeepSmiling - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 11:35 am: The Kirk/Roskam article indicates that “Both want to see an expansion of tax credits for SMALL businesses, which Obama reportedly opposes.” [emphasis added] “They also are concerned the spending side has too much “pork” and not enough substantive job-creation projects.” Let’s give this important bill a little time. Is a month too much to ask? These issues are both reasonable and workable. Let’s get this done right, rather than done in one week. - Phil Collins - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 11:38 am: Jerry, you were incorrect when you said, “George Bush ushered in the biggest tax cuts ever.” Reagan’s tax cuts were bigger. In 1981, Reagan persuaded Congress to cut the highest federal income tax rate from 70% to 50%. In ‘86, he convinced them to cut the highest rate from 50% to 28%. When the rich had more money, they invested it, creating jobs for many poor people. According to the Dept. of Labor, the unemployment rate decreased from 7.1%, in 1980, to 5.3%, in ‘89. When more people had jobs, more people paid taxes, causing the federal government revenue to almost double, from about $515 billion, in 1981, to about $990 billion, in ‘89. Bush’s budgets were too liberal because his tax cuts were too small, and his spending increases were too large. Usually, Democrats want to spend more than Republicans, but Bush’s budgets increased spending more than Clinton’s. Leory, you said that the party in power makes things bigger, but that’s not always correct. The majority of Republicans want to make the federal government smaller. - Rich Miller - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 11:39 am: Reagan also pushed through one of the largest tax hikes ever to that point. And, PC, he supported an amnesty program for illegal aliens. - Carl Nyberg - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 11:47 am: The majority of Republicans want to make the federal government smaller. –Phil Collins Have you considered the possibility that Republican politicians are lying to you? The Republicans controlled the federal gov’t from 2001-07. Did the GOP shrink the federal government? Phil, sophisticated people pay attention to what politicians do and discount what they say. - Ela Observer - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 2:05 pm: Kirk & Roskam are both eyeing Burris’s seat in 2010. Kirk especially has to establish some conservative bona fides if he expects to survive a primary. - Judgment Day Is On The Way - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 2:07 pm: “…expansion of tax credits for SMALL businesses” There’s the key. If you really want to accomplish something, why not take a fairly substantial piece of that $800 to $900 bil and really capitalize the SBA so we can get a potful of new loans made to SMALL BUSINESSES? You want to appeal to the Republicans to get them on board? - that will go a long way to do it. But things like $335 mil for fighting STD just causes problems in getting bipartisan support. You take that money instead & put it into SBA lending where the max. loan is $250k, you’ll start to see results. That’s how you create sustainable employment. And that’s how you build support from the other side. - Rich Miller - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 2:09 pm: ===You want to appeal to the Republicans to get them on board? - that will go a long way to do it.=== You’re deluding yourself if you think that there’s any way he can get lots of GOP support on that bill. Won’t happen. It’ll be just enough to claim a smidgeon of bipartisanship, but other than that, it won’t happen. - Phil Collins - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 2:36 pm: If Rep. Kirk doesn’t run for re-election, in 2010, St. Rep. Elizabeth Coulson, a Republican of the 17th Dist., should run for his seat. She agrees with him about many issues, and she’s been a legislator since 1999. - Judgment Day Is On The Way - Wednesday, Jan 28, 09 @ 3:25 pm: Rich, perhaps you are correct. But otoh, if the thought of relying on the House version for 95%++ of what you want in terms of legislative action is supposed to create a bipartisan atmosphere, well, that’s an absolute guarantee that there will be virtually no support from Republicans. Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.