Word: congress
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...more than 20 years before she was elected to Congress at the age of 47, Nancy Pelosi's full time job was rearing her five children. She calls it invaluable training for her current job as the first woman Speaker of the House, in which managing her 253-member caucus can be a daily challenge. "Having raised that many children and grandchildren she has eyes in the back of her head," says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and an assistant to the Speaker. As Pelosi, 69, nears the most important vote of her career, she'll need...
...economy and the mind-set of wage earners. That's why President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, called jobs his "No. 1 focus" and proposed repurposing bank-bailout money to lend more to small businesses, which would then, presumably, generate jobs. On March 17, Congress passed a job-creation bill that includes, among other things, an estimated $13 billion worth of tax incentives to coax companies into adding to their payrolls. (See 10 perfect jobs for the recession...
...also the reason the job-creation bill passed by Congress includes an accelerated tax break for companies buying equipment. Companies that sell equipment need people to build it, and companies that buy equipment need people to run and maintain it. Many firms outside of financial services have surprisingly solid balance sheets, Manyika points out, and might be wooed into investing sooner rather than later. That would drum up sales for the firms they'd be buying equipment from...
...Congress wants more and better jobs in the U.S., it should do things like create a permanent tax break for companies that invest in research and development, make it easier for foreigners who get science and engineering Ph.D.s at American universities to stick around after graduation, and spend serious time and money improving the nation's infrastructure, including the electric grid and broadband network. Such initiatives will not create many jobs that can be tallied on a spreadsheet. What they will do is more important: lay the groundwork for businesses to innovate and grow...
...perhaps most important of all, Benenson believes the current polls confuse a skepticism about health care reform with broad discontent over the political process in Washington. "This is what people don't understand," he says. "People are frustrated that Congress doesn't seem able to work together to do the job that people think they sent them there to do." A solution to this problem is action...