[Vision2020] Putting Millionaires Before Jobs

[Jay Borden]

What is it that this $60B spending will do that the previous "shovel
ready stimulus packages" didn't?

 

 

Jay

 

 




________________________________

November 3, 2011


Putting Millionaires Before Jobs


There's nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport;
Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for
decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On
Thursday, though, when President Obama's plan to spend $60 billion on
infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate
<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67568.html> , not a single
Republican agreed to break the party's filibuster. 

That's because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax
on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000
taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/how-obamas-jobs-poli
cies-would-really-impact-the-rich-hint-not-much/2011/10/24/gIQAVvl3CM_bl
og.html> , adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills.
Protecting that elite group - and hewing to their rigid antitax vows -
was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of
construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of
people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports. 

Senate Republicans filibustered the president's full jobs act last month
for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces
of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate
Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might
put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year's
presidential election. 

There is no question that the infrastructure bill would be good for the
flagging economy - and good for the country's future development. It
would directly spend $50 billion on roads, bridges, airports and mass
transit systems, and it would then provide another $10 billion to an
infrastructure bank to encourage private-sector investment in big public
works projects. 

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, co-sponsored an
infrastructure-bank bill in March
<http://hutchison.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=755> , and other
Republicans have supported similar efforts over the years. But the
Republicans' determination to stick to an antitax pledge clearly trumps
even their own good ideas. 

A competing Republican bill, which also failed on Thursday, was cobbled
together in an attempt to make it appear as if the party has equally
valid ideas on job creation and rebuilding. It would have extended the
existing highway and public transportation financing for two years,
paying for it with a $40 billion cut to other domestic programs.
Republican senators also threw in a provision that would block the
Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new clean air rules. Only
in the fevered dreams of corporate polluters could that help create
jobs. 

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, bitterly accused
Democrats of designing their infrastructure bill to fail by paying for
it with a millionaire's tax, as if his party's intransigence was so
indomitable that daring to challenge it is somehow underhanded. 

The only good news is that the Democrats aren't going to stop. There are
many more jobs bills to come, including extension of unemployment
insurance and the payroll-tax cut. If Republicans are so proud of
blocking all progress, they will have to keep doing it over and over
again, testing the patience of American voters. 

 

___________________________

Wayne A. Fox
wayne.a.fox at gmail.com

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