Reid, Pelosi beg Bush: Please don’t let us be irrelevant
Gawd. If there’s one thing that irritates me more than the surge of Clintonesque talk about an “economic stimulus,” it’s all the useless politicians clambering to ride the bailout bandwagon. We have President Bush and Hillary Clinton out-bidding each other on the housing front. And now, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi begging Bush not to let the stimulus train leave the station without them.
The Hill reports:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday asked President Bush to meet with them to discuss an economic stimulus package after he returns from a Middle East trip.
The Democratic leaders expressed their concern over the “deteriorating state of the economy” and said they would urge Bush to work with the congressional majority to jointly fight off a potential recession.
“Prominent economists associated with Republican and Democratic administrations have called on us to supplement monetary policy with an immediate fiscal stimulus,” Reid and Pelosi said in a letter to Bush. “These same economists have stated that the most effective and responsible stimulus policies adhere to three simple principles: they must be timely, targeted and temporary.”
The Democrats expressed their desire to work with the White House and congressional Republicans “to immediately develop a legislative plan based upon these principles so it can be passed and implemented into law without delay.”
This made me snort:
Reid and Pelosi also cautioned Bush not to announce a plan on his own until both sides had met to discuss the issue.
Or else what?
***
Commenter libertyvista: “Why not get some judges confirmed and then we’ll talk.”
The NYTimes has more on this new stab at bipartisanship. Bipartisanship = watch your wallets:
The Bush administration and Congressional leaders, increasingly concerned about a possible recession, are moving closer to agreeing that an economic stimulus package is needed soon, Washington officials said Friday.
A Republican familiar with the administration’s thinking said Mr. Bush would present ideas to stimulate the economy, most likely in the form of tax relief, in his State of the Union message on Jan. 28. Mr. Bush will not decide on the details until he returns from the Middle East next week.
Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are also suggesting that they might be able to put aside longstanding partisan differences and work on a stimulus measure, lawmakers and aides said Friday.
In a fresh sign of the possibility of an agreement on a roughly $100 billion package of tax cuts and spending to spur the economy, Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, wrote to President Bush on Friday saying, “We want to work with you.”
On Monday, Mr. Bush acknowledged that Americans were “anxious about the economy” and said he was studying what actions to take. But this Republican, speaking anonymously to avoid pre-empting the White House, said, “If the decision was going to be ‘no,’ he wouldn’t have put that out there.”
Some Democrats say they could support tax relief focused on lower-income people and, perhaps, even tax cuts for corporations, if the White House and the Republican Congressional leadership accept some spending increases like extended unemployment benefits or aid to states to help them avert spending cuts.
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MM
Or else they’ll stomp their little feet and cry!!!!!
Break out the Johnson and Johnson’s!
Why not get some judges confirmed and then we’ll talk.
since when do Democrats want ‘targeted and temporary’ economic meddling?
I can agree with tax cuts. However, I don’t agree giving them to people who barely pay any, if at all Federal income tax. That is not economic stimulation.
Those at the higher end have been hit hard…especially by the AMT. How about getting rid of that for starters?
How about reducing the top rate down to 31% instead of the obnoxious 39.6 rate that it is now?
Those of us that live in a high income state like CA are already paying 10% to the state. Add that to the Federal income tax, we barely have anything left. No wonder we can’t spend any money.
THAT would be a good start. Giving back money we already own.
A thin line between PeloReid and Franklin Foer:
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Iron my spread sheet.
Sorry Michelle, Harry and Nancy bring out the worst in me. I apologize for the language.
The more that these people talk recession the quicker they are going to put us in one. the DOW fell 246 points today after the stimulus news broke.
Boobelfish translation:
Timely = Give us your money now.
Targeted = To those who contribute to our campaign funds.
Temporary = So we can’t judge the effectiveness after the public loses interest.
The Senate and House have oversight commitees that should have seen this coming. They didn’t do their job then why should we believe they will do it now.
Then, they’re not economists, they’re socialists.
In 1985, Ireland had 17% unemployment and was in danger of becoming the most literate third world nation on the planet. The government tried everything. They cut spending but not much because they were socialists. They tried dropping the interest rate but all that did was provide a blip on the economic graphs. Nothing temporary was working. They had a 5-tier income tax with the top bracket over 50%. During the 1980s, Ireland’s top export was people. 20,000 a year looking for a better economy.
That’s when supply-siders got elected. They cut taxes and removed some of the brackets. And they kept cutting taxes every year. The corporate tax rate was at 40%. In 1993 they cut it in half to 20%. Their total tax revenue in 1993 was 1.5 billion. Five years later in 1997 it was 5.1 billion. NOT by raising taxes but by cutting them!
With a corporate tax rate at 12% and a personal tax rate at 10%, France complained that Ireleand’s tax rates were “unfair” and wanted them raised to 29%! Ireland agreed that they were unfair because personal taxes were lower. So they lowered the corporate tax rate to 10%.
A long time government official said of Ireleand’s new found economic wealth, “I spent 25 years looking for jobs for people. Now I’m looking for people for jobs.” That’s because practically every U.S. business has it’s Eurpoean HQ in Ireland.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than socialism.
By the way, without any socialist “stimulus” packages, Ireland’s unemployment rate dropped from 17% in 1985 to just under 4% in 1999. And all they did was cut taxes.
Yes, it CAN work here, too.
Translation for Reid & Pelosi:
ME TOO! ME TOO! I WANNA BE THE GOOD COP!!!
WAIT FOR ME!
WAIT FOR MEEEEEE!
They really are irrelevant.
who?
I’m sure the money from the 10,000 earmarks last year could stimulate something..
This is pandering for votes..we will give you money to be poor..we will bail your state out even though it is wasting your money..
Yea,whenever I hear Washington Democrats start talking about a ‘stimulus package’ I know it’s just another excuse to reward local Democrat politicians with payoffs for their own favorite local pet boondoggle projects and to jack up Federal spending in the process…Slick started out his own administration with one so called ‘stimulus package’ of about $30bn or so with that in mind,supposedly to ‘jump start the economy’..even though by then the economy was no longer in recession and had been on the rebound for some time…send this nonsense back to the garbage dump
When the likes of Pelosi and Reid make an attempt to play nice, watch out for the knife in your back.
Wow, I can just imagine what Reid and Pelosi want – could be that Kalifornia is 600 million in the hole / month?
Lets cut off funds to sanctuary cities/states and use that to kick start the rest of the country.
The worst part of this is that after seven years of having his teeth kicked in by the Dems and the Treason Media, ol’ dumb Dubya will probably do the “Christian thing” and turn the other cheek, bend over and grab his ankles, all in the vain hope that they’ll like him. Fool.
I hope they stimulate my bank account.
great stuff johnholliday!
.
The peloser-reid bunch are just so damn weasel-ly…they turn my stomach.
BUT, I wonder if Bush doesn’t have some leverage now for selecting some judges or death tax elimination or …? gotta be worth something quite good?
Hey “W” , don’t leave anything on the table!
They don’t want America to do good unless they can take credit for it. This is our leadership. And they don’t want to take any of the blame for anything that might go wrong.
These guys in DC are absolute idiots. They don’t deserve any power at all. How about they recognize that they are idiots and only mess things up and start SPENDING LESS OF OUR MONEY instead of more.
If they spend less, they’ll have more and they won’t need as much from us – there’s your economic stimulus package.
I hope that we wash out all of the politicians that took credit for the good economy in the late 90′s soon. All politicians are saying what geniuses they are because the .com boom took place in the 90′s in SPITE OF government.
But people like ruDy and Clinton used that American ingenuity economic expansion to talk about what amazing things they did while they were in government. It’s equivalent to the countries in the middle east saying that their fiscal policy is solid because of something they did instead of the price of oil going up.
Politicians need to get out of the way, stop taking our money, and let us live without their ‘help’. Let us keep our money and that will be all the ‘help’ that we’ll need.
The funny thing watching global business news is they talk about the US recession as though it is ongoing.
When you switch to American stations they talk about the economy ‘might’ slow down. It’s going to be bad, and it’s going to be bad for a while. Everyone in the world knows it but America and American pundits and politicians. They think they can do something to avoid it.
America is a CAPITALIST society. That’s what makes us great. Democracy doesn’t make us great. Capitalist societies ebb and flow. Congress thinks they can do something to dry up the ocean to keep the tide from moving so far. Good luck. They are just going to waste more money.
BTW, thanks MM for letting me vent like this. I enjoy an outlet for my thoughts. I’m mostly a hermit because I don’t like convincing people that I’m right. . . it takes too much time. I prefer contemplating new things to myself rather than rehashing old ideas that I’ve already had to other people.
Just 1 question for the irrelevant liberals in todays congress; How do you plan to pay for this bailout?
So, if the DOW falls 246 on the mention of a stimulus package, what do these socialists think will happen when they implement the piece of garbage?
As Margaret Thatcher once said, “Eventually, socialists run out of other people’s money.”
Same way the pay for every thing…..borrow the money.
Not a good forum for market analysis….
TOO FREAKIN LATE!!!!!!!
Reid and Pelosi couldn’t stimulate a pervert in a Tiajuana brothel.
Go away spoiled bratty children I have no time for you.
Please don’t “cut taxes” for the lower income poor people who, in reality, pay no taxes anyway; another “look what we’ve done” plan that means nothing. We know, democrats, who you call “wealthy” and it isn’t all mansions and limousines. It’s the people who pay the taxes every year and live on budgets. How about cutting our taxes too? If you earn more than $40K a year, welcome to the democrats definition of “wealthy”. How do you stimulate an economy by cutting from zero?
it’s not like any of the current republicans have worked to cut spending (save for Ron Paul and a few others)
You read something every day that makes you go they can’t top themselves. Then tomorrow comes. It’s only a matter of time before I’m standing in front of the library yelling at people when they walk by,
It’s been refreshing not hearing the shrill voices of dissonance: Pelosi & Reid.
The best stimulus package for me would be to get my income tax refund. Oh I forgot it will be held up because congress could not do it’s job!!
How come the only times that Pelosi and Reid seem to be heard from is when they want to spend more of our money, except for our troops and national security interests? (And also in Reid’s case the childish charade of having the Senate in “session” for a few seconds every day or so.)
Making the Bush tax cuts PERMANENT might be a good start.
And the elimination of the AMT.
And the elimination of all ‘Death Taxes’
And the elimination of earmarks.
and I would love to see us adopt the Fair Tax as it would eliminate most of the societal spin and power Congress wields on our daily lives.
this is a clear case of how power hungry these two are and how much they have attempted to water down the executive branch powers (if only in their own minds). pelosi seems to think that she has equal power to the president. not without the other 500 or so congress critters that you share do you have equal power. executive =1 person branch and legislative branch = approx 500+. You have 1/500+ the power of Bush.
if i were Bush, I would say you call me b..
I’d do it just to spite them.
Bush: Hey Dick get the giant rat trap’s out Nancy and Harry’s comin for lunch.
Cheney: Where do you want them George at the front door?
Bush: No we don’t want them to get that close, put them at the front gate.
Those who forget the past, are doomed to repeat it! What have these two clueless propagandists ever done in their leadership positions, to make them think President Bush should trust them now? They ask Mr. Bush for “inclusion,” but preface it with a threat? Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!
These Demi-dunces are initiating a set up, to place blame for a failure on President Bush, just like they did with his father (“Watch my lips…”) They have no intention of cooperating with the President. To do so, would mean they would have to give him credit for something positive, and that’s just not going to happen!
I can just see me 1 year from now, standing on the corner with a paper cup and a sign, “I’m a victim of Economic Stimulus”.
Didn’t Bella also just say the Surge was a complete failure.