Obama Uses Labor Day Speech To Propose Infrastructure Bank
Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at 12:00AMIn Milwaukee yesterday, President Barack Obama made his pitch for a new round of spending aimed at jumpstarting the nation’s anemic job market.
The President told a crowd gathered at the city’s annual Labor Day festival that his $50 billion proposal would fund new transportation projects, including improvements to road and airport surfaces, railways and air traffic control systems. Additionally, the funds would spur high-speed rail projects, an investment that is known to be high on the President’s wishlist.
Obama said the projects would be fully paid for, and administered by a new national infrastructure bank run by the federal government that, according to Obama, “will change the way Washington spends your tax dollars.”
With unemployment at 9.6%, the White House says the goal of the proposed initiatives is to breathe life into a sputtering job market. However, opponents of the $50 billion package argue that paying for more spending by ending tax breaks for businesses is not the solution.
‘The American people want us to stop spending, so let’s just give them some certainty,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) over the weekend. “Let’s extend the existing tax cuts, and then let’s give some more tax breaks to small businesses and large, and then maybe the American people will have some confidence.”
Pence Tells Tea Partiers To 'Remember In November'
A prominent House conservative told participants in the second annual 9/12 Rally in Washington yesterday that the Obama administration is using the recession to wage socioeconomic war.
“No American should face a tax increase in January…not one. We will not compromise our economy to accommodate the class warfare rhetoric of this administration,” said Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Chairman of the House Republican Conference. Pence told the roughly 100,000 in attendance to stand against President Obama’s attempt to allow a series of tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at the end of this year.
“We do not consent to higher taxes on any American in the worst economy in 25 years. When did higher taxes ever get anybody hired?”
Pence spoke at the same rally last year, which focused mainly on drumming up resistance to a healthcare reform bill that would later become law. This year, the message from Pence and other speakers, including conservative Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), was purely political.
Pence urged the audience to focus on voting out liberal members of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, while Cuccinelli touted his own efforts to stop provisions within the aforementioned healthcare law from going into effect in his state.
The rally was organized by the conservative nonprofit organization FreedomWorks, along with a number of smaller local Tea Party groups. Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project played an additional role in helping organize the rally both this year and last.