Senate passes $838 billion stimulus bill
MSNBC just announced that the US Senate has approved their $838 million stimulus bill. Their version one close enough to the bill ratified by Congress about a week ago but it had $100 billion in spending trimmed in a move to win the votes of moderate Republicans. Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania broke ranks with their party and helped pass the bill 61 to 36.
I haven't had the opportunity to look at the bills, but here's some differences highlighted in the article :
House's bill costs $819 billion. Senate, $838 billion.
Senate : Tax breaks for new cars
Senate Houses' allocation for NASA by $50 million
Senate : They sneaked in money for "network monitoring"
Now the Senate and Congress will be duking it out for a final bill to go to the President. Ugh. If only they had a system by which people could see all these changes and differences easily.
Spending
I really wish that the bills were listed on the white house website in full - I thought that that's what transparency was supposed to mean. I am a supporter of stimulus, though. This country was built through strong government programs and spending. The conservative myth that all private spending is wise and productive and public spending foolish and wasteful is what has gotten us into the economic mess we find ourselves in today. It's the decline in national investments that has led us to a place where from 1989 to 2006, the highest-earning 10 percent of U.S. households collected over 90 percent of the nation’s income gains. Today the top 1 percent of American families receives 23 percent of all personal income, up from just 10 percent in 1979. Corporate executives earn 275 times as much as average workers, compared with 27 times in 1973 (these facts are taken from the downloadable book Thinking Big, which I highly recommend). If tax cuts could save us, they would have already done so. Time for some stimulus AND spending.