Word: congress
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fearful, hushed tones, she would go on to describe a food safety bill working its way though Congress that threatened to thrust the country into martial law. I did a little fact-checking, and the bill was indeed real. The martial law part...not so much...
When Barack Obama asked Congress to pass a massive economic-stimulus bill last January, he offered Republicans outstretched arms, saying he wanted to seek "solutions that advance not the interests of any party, or the agenda of any one group, but the aspirations of all Americans." Ten months later, he is asking for perhaps $200 billion more, but this time he comes ready to rumble...
...much the new programs would cost. He gave few details of how they would be paid for, and he never explained when the plan would go into effect. As he has done in the past, the President is leaving most of those details to Democrats in Congress, who are likely to split up his requests into separate measures over the coming months. Obama wants about $50 billion in new spending on roads and bridges, new tax incentives for small-business hiring, a zeroing of the capital gains tax for small businesses and an extension of several other small-business incentives...
...President's logic is at odds with the initial premise of TARP, which was sold to Congress as a loan program that would be mostly paid back to the Treasury, where its proceeds would be used to pay down the deficit. "The $700 billion program we have proposed is not a spending program," former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson explained before Congress in September 2008. It didn't take long for Republicans to take that position. "The stimulus money clearly was a spending bill. TARP was a loan - a loan to be paid back. And we know that a number...
...Those specifics will no doubt come out over the next few weeks and months as Congress attempts to pass a series of large spending bills, which could include a number of the programs that Obama announced. "One of the central goals of this Administration is restoring fiscal responsibility," he said in his speech. But as long as the economy continues in its fragile state, that goal will remain secondary to the more immediate task at hand. Which means that Obama's calls for government spending will keep being met by Republican cries of hypocrisy...