John Ensign: “I wish to make a couple comments about that. We have not received the bill. There are rumors going around about this…”

“I wish to make a couple comments about that. We have not received the bill. There are rumors going around about this, that, and the other. One of the details that seems to be coming out is that the housing portion of the stimulus bill has been cut down dramatically. I had an alternative to the stimulus bill that focused on housing, to a great degree, and also targeted some tax cuts to families and small businesses to create jobs. The reason we focused a great deal of it on the housing problem was because the housing problem is the cancer that has dragged the rest of the economy down. It has spread throughout the rest of the economy. As any person in the medical field understands that if you just treat the symptoms and not the underlying cause, the patient gets sicker and sicker. Unfortunately, the President is talking about fixing housing but certainly not at this point. It is regrettable that we didn't take a big portion of the money that is being spent in this stimulus bill and actually fix housing. It is very disturbing because we are going to spend $800 billion and who knows how much more in order to fix the housing problem. We are running up debt after debt on our children.”