David Obey: “what happened to New York was a terrible thing. When it happened, I was one of the four people in this Congress who…”

“what happened to New York was a terrible thing. When it happened, I was one of the four people in this Congress who helped negotiate a $20 billion what I thought was a rock hard commitment to New York to deal with the problems. Since then, the administration has tried to change the deal. Some people in the Congress have been trying to fix it. There is a right way and a wrong way to fix that problem. The wrong way is to try to fix it by stealing money from unemployed people in other States in the Union, which is what the arrangement was. What happened is that the administration's original $20 billion commitment has been chiseled down to $10 billion or so in this bill. Then, when there was a public eruption about that, the White House worked out a deal to take $2 billion, which had originally been requested by the President to help unemployed people in all 50 States in the Union, and instead, they moved that money only to help New York. That solved New York's problem only partially. It still leaves New York over $8 billion short. What it does to my State is take approximately $33 million away from unemployed people in my State. It does the same thing in Minnesota. That is on top of what the majority has already done to my State by their tax bill. My new Republican Governor in Wisconsin indicates that the actions of the Republican House tax bill will cost Wisconsin an extra $300 million on its State deficit.”