My Immediate Stimulus

My big problem with the stimulus bill is that it's filled with more pork that a package of Farmer John bacon. Rather than detail all of it here, I'll let some people who've actually gone through it do it for me.

There are a lot of things in the bill that people can make an argument for funding. However, this is supposed to be an economic stimulus bill, not an appropriations bill. This bill's cost is up to $900 billion. Shouldn't we be asking how are we going to pay for all this? And with Congressional Budget forecasting that some of this money won't be spent until 2010 and 2011, how is that going to help the economy in the short term?

My proposal is simple.

1) Extend unemployment benefits for the next year. This will immediately help people who have been laid off.

2) Suspend the payroll tax for the next six months. This will immediately put money back in the hands of working people and their employers.

3) Cut every tax bracket by 5% and make it retroactive to last year. This will give everybody bigger rebate checks.

4) Cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. Make that permanent. Encourage more businesses to do business in America by bringing our corporate tax rate more in line with (and in some places lower than) the rest of the world.

Once those things are done, then we can look at spending government money on infrastructure building - like updating the national power grid, which really should be done. Currently, there is $4.5 billion alloted in the bill to update the grid. The problem is that a 2004 study estimated that is would take at least $165 billion to actually do it right. Who's paying attention to these figures?

Let's take those four steps I outlined above to provide immediate relief. Then Congress and the President can sit down and actually write a good bill rather than rush something through and get it wrong.