PRESIDENT Barack Obama has promised immediate investment to create jobs and repair infrastructure after Congress passed a $787 billion economic stimulus package – the biggest spending bill in American history.
The president will sign the bill into law in Denver tomorrow before travelling to Arizona, one of the states hardest hit by the housing crisis that threatens hundreds of thousands of mortgage-payers with the loss of their homes.
“This is a major milestone on our road to recovery, and I want to thank the members of Congress who came together in common purpose to make it happen,” Mr Obama said in his weekly radio address.
“Because they did, I will sign this legislation into law shortly, and we’ll begin making the immediate investments necessary to put people back to work doing the work America needs done.”
No Republicans voted for the stimulus bill in the House of Representatives and just three backed it in the senate, despite Mr Obama’s call for bipartisan action to deal with the economic crisis.
South Carolina Republican senator Lindsay Graham complained yesterday that most Republicans had been shut out of negotiations leading up to the bill’s passage.
“If I may say, if this is going to be bipartisanship, the country’s screwed,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “I know bipartisanship when I see it.
“I’ve participated in it. I’ve gone back home and gotten primary opponents because I wanted to be bipartisan. There’s nothing about this process that’s been bipartisan. This is not ‘change we can believe in’. You rammed it through the house. You started out with the idea of, ‘we won, we write the bill’.”
Republicans wanted a smaller stimulus package made up almost entirely of tax cuts but Democratic congresswoman Maxine Walters said the public spending projects that account for two thirds of the plan will address urgent needs throughout the country.
“Many well-known economists say that this should be a trillion-dollar bailout bill, that we need to put more into our economy,” she said. “We have children going to schools in deplorable conditions, and so we wanted more money in school construction. We thought, not only does that create jobs, it’s an investment in the future.”
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said that, although the spending plans would be implemented quickly, it would be some time before they had an impact on job losses, which have been running at the rate of half a million each month.
He also defended a plan to bail out financial institutions, despite complaints on Wall Street that it lacked detail.