Stimulus plan: Invest in our country

It’s small businesses that will put people back to work; that’s how we’re going to get this country back on its feet. It’s entrepreneurs and small business owners who respond with enthusiasm that are key. Big, established, "trusted" companies dug this hole by defining success in terms of short-term profits on their bottom line that do little if anything to protect American jobs or the well-being of their employees.

When we see bulldozers and excavators moving dirt for new construction, when we see trucks hauling instead of sitting idle at auction sites, then we'll know things are turning around.

While Bush was pushing privatized retirement plans, we were all being set up to fund Wall Street bonuses. We need lenders to play fair, not slap new fees and payments on consumers. More regulation of lending practices, not less, is critical to our economic health.

Bottom line: The new administration needs to reverse the trend of layoffs and plant closures; our government needs to work for the people by rebuilding economy and the American Dream - by putting Americans back to work.

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Never underestimate the power of a woman.

The U.S. economy continues to reverberate from the policies (or perhaps lack of policies) that the Bush-Cheney administration championed since taking office 8 years ago, and by most accounts we've now lost over 3.5 million jobs during the recession that they bestowed upon the tax-payers and future tax-payers. 600,000 Americans have been laid off in January alone. The mortgage foreclosures continue unabated, the unemployment rate is soaring, yet now that Bush is out of office certain members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives continue to support the trickle-down theories that brought us to this economic precipice. But it's not their fault.

The bloc that blocked

I don't mean the state of the economy - that's the fault of everybody who ever championed, or simply ignored, deregulation of the banking and financial industries. No, it's not their fault that they're engaged in partisan posturing at a time when the country has delivered a broad mandate for new approaches, because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tricked them. The Speaker got the minority to circle their wagons, to vote as a block against the first version of the new Stimulus bill even though they had been supportive of Bush's hurried spending bills to bail out banks as the previous administration was winding down, and now the Republican Senators are largely following suit.

Pelosi ran a bill through quickly for a vote, and now they're posturing desperately while the tax payers and voters watch more closely than the politicos are accustomed to - they're being downright obstructionist, and that leaves the Democrats in a stronger position.

Some strategists might suggest that at such a juncture the wise thing would be to give the newly elected President what he asks for, hoping that by the time the mid-term election rolls around they'd have something to point their fingers at if it fails while saying, "we did what he asked." But the voters are seeing the Republicans suggest we try "cutting taxes" again. Cutting taxes sounds pretty good to the people we've bailed out on Wall Street, I suppose, but when you're worried about losing your job and keeping food on the table your concern is not for the Capital Gains tax which is already considerably lower than the Income Tax, your concern is over staunching the flow of jobs before unemployment spirals to the levels of the Great Depression. President Obama's right to insist on timely action, the same sort of need the prior administration finally woke up to in the waning lame-duck days of their power.

Theatrics are alive and well in the U.S. Senate

What are the Republicans opposed to? Not so much, it turns out: something under 1% of the spending, yet rather than come with proposals for the voters to contemplate their doing what worked in the past, made-for-Fox drama and histrionics, name calling. While the President is visibly reaching out to find common ground, some of the most influential Republicans in the capitol are playing for sound-bites of their outrage and opposition, "...you have to start from scratch" - they failed to realize that Nancy Pelosi invited them back into their old, discredited "we-they" postures for the national audience, and failed to understand the urgency and pain of their constituents as the layoffs and foreclosures continue.

The reality is the situation is urgent; we can't allow the economy of the nation to falter and stall, we can't afford it. The decisions have to be made and plans launched by people who can't remotely follow the calculus that economists such as Paul Krugman or Mark Anson employ. Americans want to get back to work - and we want our elected leaders to do their work swiftly so we can stop laying off teachers and assembly line workers and losing their productive participation in our economy.

Maybe if we enforced layoffs, or even pay cuts, in Congress in proportion to the rest of the country, or the budget, they'd get off their rhetoric and get the bill passed.