Last week the House passed an $819Billion stimulous package. The bill passed easily, but without 1 republican vote in favor.

I've put together a complete list of the spending and tax portions of the House Bill that you can take a look at.

The Senate is trying to pass a bill, now. Once done, a committee will pull both bills together and create a compromise bill to send on to President Obama to sign into law.

Republican stumbling blocks to the bill center around the spending portion, which most unbiased people would agree has many pieces that are head starts to programs the democrats and President Obama have promised to get started, but have little to do with job creation or stimulating the economy.

So I say we need to compromise. The first poll, titles Republican Viewpoint, pick three programs that make no sense in the stimulus package and vote to eliminate them. The second poll, look at it from the Democrat's perspective and pick three programs that simply have to stay in the stimulus package.

Here is a complete list of all the spending programs and tax plans in the House bill:

I know nobody likes spending, but it seems to me everything on that list is pretty important...

There's not a thing on YOUR Democrat OR Republic list that I would keep. Not a single item.

I would cut corporate tax rates in half, and make the Bush tax cuts permanent, eliminate the wind-fall profits tax, announce a national plan to exploit ALL domestic energy resources (including nuclear) and a 20 year moratorium on all EPA environmental regulations, studies and lawsuits on energy development and production, cancel the most recent EPA CAFE standards and keep them at the earlier level, repeal of the Community Reinvestment Act, and then just stand back and get government out of the way.

THAT is the "bail-out" plan I would propose. We'd be outta this thing in a blink.

Keep in mind that with the exception of the last item, these are existing plans with funding already. The plan calls for additional funding for these areas.


Just for clarity, I picked the top 10 expensive spending items on the Stimulus Bill passed by the House. It's not MY list. It's a list of actual spending increases passed by the House. I appreciate your contribution to the thread, though. I suspect a lot of people feel that way.

I vote for KTC's plan.

I appreciate your response, KTC. It would be an interesting country if we lived in a KingTopocracy.

I don't think your plan would do well in our current rebublic, though. Republicans would HATE your plan. You actually have more spending than the Democrats and are not doing enough with taxes. Democrats might actually like your plan, if they could figure out how to put millions of out of work people back to work. At least some of the democrat's spending is designed to give people a chance to be employed over a long period of time and a chance to be the first to be trained on new energy technologies, which is kind of like giving them cash, but in some ways better.

Then there's some picky things. I know we had a bad year last year, but do you really think there were only $100B in capital gains last year? The government's budget is in the trillions. I'm guessing $100B won't cover everyone, so how do you choose who gets that?

So, since I like your answers, how are you going to create jobs for people in your KingTopocracy?

Just put my name on the check

The Bush tax Cuts for the wealthy should be repealed.And we need
targeted taxcuts for the poor and Middle class.They will use the
money to buy things.We tried tax cuts for the wealthy during Bush and they failed miserably.

We need to spend money to fix our Infercurture.That helped get people back to work during the depression.

there is no middle class
the rich will stay rich
the poor will remain poor
and i must add that canada is following the united states right down the shitter

We sre past the point where stimulating spending in any form is going to stop the slide. There is a point on the curve where job losses become so high that no amount of tax cuts or stimulus checks is going to make people start buying again.

IMHO what we need to see is job creation, on a massive scale. Even if the jobs are only temporary (< 10 years) the net effect will be to allay the fear within the corporate sector (who will begin spending and hiring again) and the private citizens will feel a little better making purchases again. So anything the govt can do to create jobs by building "stuff", researching "stuff", or providing some needed service "stuff" will be like penicillin to an infection. At the same time this country can begin to play catch up with the rest of the 1st world which has had a vigorous public works and R&D effort going while we watched our infrastructure literally fall apart arguing about whether we should be teaching creationism next to evolution.

To all the tax cut advocates, that only works so long as people have real incomes coming in to reduce the taxable rates on. We are at 7.6% unemployment and the numbers are heading towards double digits with a bullet. When >10% of your population has no income to tax, what exactly are the tax cuts supposed to do? Talking about beating a dead horse!



I agree with others here who say deep-six the idea of giving stimulus to the corporations and banking establishments directly. We've seen what the banking-corporate sector does with such funds, they either horde it away or continue on with business as usual. We have not seen a significant loosening of the credit markets, the job losses are spiraling out of control, and none of our corporate community seems to be willing to do anything innovate to help us or the country. You wanna address the problem, give stimulus directly to the people who are in trouble with their mortgages with a variety of REAL options for refinancing (as in not just "encouraging" the mortgage companies to do it), as well as in certain cases outright grants or government back loan subsidies. The bottom line is that if you want to stabilize the housing market and the dominoe effect it has caused, get the mortgage default rate back below 1%. This will make all the mortgage backed securities (MBCs) have real value again, then we can set reasonable regulations for an orderly dissolving of those toxic monstrosities. The world will thank us!

Finally, partisan bull-crap is so dead right now. Aren't we passed the conservative/liberal stuff yet, if not, we damn sure need to be. If it means cutting out a bunch of programs that Dems would like to see but won't result in IMMEDIATE stimulus, fine, as a card carrying liberal I will be the first to drop the axe and bring them up later as seperate bills. HOWEVER, it also means the conservatives need to get out of their stuck-on-stupid mantra that tax cuts and corporate aid are going to magically make it all OK, been there, done that, part of the reason why we are here now.

We need reasonable solutions, not partisan rancor, not ideological dogma.