Herb Kohl: “to distort Shakespeare's words, I come to the floor today to bury the stimulus package, not to praise it. There has not…”

“to distort Shakespeare's words, I come to the floor today to bury the stimulus package, not to praise it. There has not been much praiseworthy in the way Congress has responded to the recession that started last March and intensified after the attacks of 9-11. Last fall, and even this month, there were short term actions we could have taken that would have had immediate and beneficial economic and humanitarian results. We could have extended unemployment benefits, as we have in every recession, and as I still hope we will. We could have offered an immediate tax rebate to those lower income workers who did not receive a full rebate from the first tax cut. We could have used the Medicaid payment formula to send financially strapped states struggling to provide health care for their residents an immediate infusion of cash. We could have offered a temporary acceleration of depreciation to encourage reluctant businesses to invest now in the recovering economy. We agreed on basic principles: help now, and do no harm in the long run. We agreed on the need. But we could not agree to put aside our partisan agendas long enough to do what we all agreed was right. Instead of talking about what we could do to help workers unemployed now, factories lying idle now, we redebated tax cuts passed last spring and pushed tax breaks that wouldn't even take effect for 10 years. We should have focused on workers, investment, consumer confidence.…”