Senate Republicans Outline New Jobs Plan

By Kaeun Yu

Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and Freshman Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) shared details of Senate Republican jobs plan on Thursday.

“This should be a bipartisan issue… We think this is a blueprint for success in a sense that it would make our country more competitive; it would increase certainty in the business community, therefore increasing private investment in jobs,” said Portman during a briefing with reporters.

Here are some main points of the plan:

• Reduce business and individual tax rates to spur economic growth
• Prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse ages under the Clean Air Act
• Require greater access to federal lands for exploration of resources to produce jobs and stabilize energy prices
• Ratify three pending export-opening agreements (Panama, Columbia and South Korea) to open up U.S. market

Alexander and Portman also compared their plan to other budget proposals that are currently being weighed on Capitol Hill.

Regarding Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget, which the House passed in April, Alexander said “I’ll vote for it, because I think it is such an urgent problem. I don’t expect House Republican budget to be the final result that we have, but as an effort to move the ball down the field, I would vote for it.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) indicated last week that he’ll likely allow a vote on it.

“For me, I’m gonna try to support almost any serious proposal that has a fair chance of stopping long term debt and stopping Washington from spending so much from what we don’t have,” Alexander added.

Portman seemed a bit cooler on the Ryan plan. “On a budget, you can never agree with every single part of it because it tends to be comprehensive,” said Portman. “This urgency is upon us and we’ve gotta figure out a way to come together, Republicans and Democrats, to solve the problem,” Portman added.

Senate Republicans Decry Health Reform

By John DuBois

Talk Radio News Service-University of New Mexico

The America’s Affordable Health Choices Act that recently passed through the House has put Senate Republicans under pressure.

Quoting a March, 2009, speech by President Obama, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that the “B” word (Bankruptcy) looms for the country. “That b word is showing up in more and more articles as the cost of health care keeps getting higher,” said Alexander.

In that speech, Obama said: “If people think we could can simply take everybody who’s not insured and load them up in the system where costs are out of control it’s not going to happen. We’ll run out of money and the federal government will be bankrupt and the state governments will be bankrupt.”

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said that health reform will result in billions of dollars in new taxes nation-wide. The bill would drive up the cost of health insurance premiums and a six point seven billion dollar annual fee that will be imposed on insurers based on market share, she said.

“I have concluded that if any of these bills were to pass Health care costs would actually increase for many Americans the opposite of what we would want for health care reform to produce,” said Collins. “A 40-year-old today buying the most popular insurance policy in the individual market in the state of Maine pays $185 a month. Under the new Senate Finance Committee bill, that 40-year-old would have to pay at least $455 a month for a policy that meets the minimum standards because of new taxes.”

Collins said Democrats and Republicans should “put together a bipartisan bill, that would reduce the number of uninsured, not penalize small business, not drive up the cost of health care and would make a real difference. There are so many areas that have bipartisan agreement on what should be done. I would like to see us work together to try to put together a bill that would do just that. To me, we should rewrite the whole bill. I don’t know that my colleagues would all agree,” she said.