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Democrats Spending Now, To Get The Votes Next Year (TIME)
The voters have spoken: they would like 8 million jobs created now, please. And without adding a penny to the deficit, because all that debt is freaking them out. Sure, it seems like a pipe dream. But Democrats — facing double-digit unemployment and an increasingly grim electoral landscape — seem determined to achieve both, or at least lose trying.
President Obama argued in a speech at the Brookings Institute on Tuesday, Dec. 8, that the two are not mutually exclusive. “There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other,” he said. “This is a false choice. Ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment insurance so that our deficits will start coming down.” In other words: spend now to save later.
The problem for Obama is that the spending has to start paying sizable dividends for the economy and employment by next fall, or else it will be too easy for Dems to be painted as bankrupting their children’s future. Congress is raising the debt ceiling now by a whopping $1.8 trillion to avoid having to raise it again just before the elections, and is creating a deficit-reduction commission. In the same vein, Democrats are trying to push through as much spending as they can now so the programs’ impacts will be felt before next year’s elections. They’re also being careful not to allocate new funds; to pay for their estimated $75 billion–to–$150 billion new-jobs bill — expected to pass the House next week — Democrats are taking money from the bank-bailout fund, which still has $300 billion left. Republicans are criticizing the move since the so-called TARP funds are meant to be loans that are supposed to help trim the deficit when they’re paid back. “It’s a huge shell game to try and give political cover to the fact that [Obama] wants to create a new stimulus program,” New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, told ABC News online program Top Line.
FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR TIME: Democrats’ Spending Could Play a Role in Next Year’s Elections – TIME.
