The Senate version actually had an amendment that would give a $15k tax incentive to upper class folks to buy more homes and cars. Forget that people are becoming homeless at an alarming rate and folks on fixed incomes are having to choose between staying warm and buying their meds. From the NYT:
Negotiations had been going on all day, following extensive talks on Tuesday night, to close the gap between the Senate and House versions. In the end, the agreed-upon package will pare back Democrats’ proposed spending on education and health programs in favor of tax cuts that were needed to win Republican votes in the Senate.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a centrist Republican whose support was crucial to the outcome, said the final package includes $150 billion in spending on infrastructure, including transportation facilities, and considerable tax relief. Moreover, she said, it includes significant money to aid state governments.
Despite intense lobbying by governors, the final deal slashed $35 billion from a proposed state fiscal stabilization fund, eliminated $16 billion in aid for school construction and sharply curtailed health care subsidies for the unemployed.
But the final bill retained a $70 billion tax cut that would spare millions of middle-class Americans from paying the alternative minimum tax in 2009, which some Democrats decried as wasting a large chunk of the bill on something that would do little to lift the economy and that Congress would have approved regardless of the recession.
Fucking tax cuts…jesus they love those damn tax cuts. As for Pork….here is Specter’s amendment…pure pork:
For instance, even as negotiators accepted many of the Senate’s reduced spending provisions, they were careful to maintain an additional $6.5 billion for medical research that was inserted at the insistence of Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is a cancer survivor.
I approve of medical research but that doesn’t have a friggin thing to do with the economy or the recession. I mean..wtf dude?
