(Washington, D.C.) – The nation’s premier taxpayer watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), today expressed outrage over reports that President Obama is planning to ask for an additional $50 billion in spending to pay for roads, railways, and runways. This new proposed stimulus package comes after his massive $862 billion package failed to stimulate the economy and create private sector employment. The Obama administration has proposed paying for this new program through tax increases on oil and gas companies.
“President Obama’s latest pronouncement is the very definition of insanity, which is to do the same thing over and over even when the result is always the same; failure. This knee-jerk reaction demonstrates not only a dearth of innovative thinking on the part of the administration; it demonstrates a blind adherence to a tax-and-spend dogma in the face of ample evidence that it does not work,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz. “One of the solutions to the fragile state of the economy and the pathetic employment numbers is staring him straight in the face; he should announce immediately that he will make all of the Bush tax cuts permanent and give businesses the relief they need to begin hiring and rebuilding.”
While the $862 billion stimulus that President Obama signed into law in February, 2009 has been exposed as an agenda-driven collection of wasteful boondoggles and a godsend to late night talk show hosts, the nation has lost more than 3.4 million jobs in that time period.
According to news reports, President Obama is expected to unveil new proposals intended to bolster the economic recovery in a speech in Cleveland today. The President has already signaled that he plans to let the Bush tax cuts expire for those earning $250,000 annually.
Even President Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag has broken with the President. Though Orszag does not favor making them permanent, he opined in a September 6 New York Times op-ed that allowing any of the Bush tax cuts to expire now would “make an already stagnating jobs market worse over the next year or two, which is exactly what would happen if the cuts expire as planned.”
“Tax increases and more government spending is part of a large down payment on a long-term legacy of fiscal woe,” continued Schatz. “In the prescient words of CAGW co-founder J. Peter Grace, ‘we’re mortgaging our children’s future…we’re robbing piggy banks, we’re taxing our defenseless children without representation. … It’s unforgivable.’”
Submitted by Citizens Against Government Waste – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government.