E-Newsletters
The old adage of putting the ‘cart before the horse' seems pretty relevant to the on-going debate about immigration reform in Congress. No plan for immigration reform will work until we control the border. The fact is though; we don't control our own borders.
Just this past week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that they would cut funding for a project along the southern border called the virtual fence. After spending over a billion dollars in taxpayer money, federal bureaucrats finally came to the conclusion that a virtual fence simply doesn't work.
Springtime is finally starting to arrive in Missouri. We are now about a week away from the opening of a new baseball season.
Baseball is the national pastime, a tradition handed down from one generation to the next. Nowadays you can catch just about any game on television. However, before national sports networks, a lot of folks simply followed their favorite team on the radio or through the box score in the paper. Sometimes the numbers tell you everything you need to know.
These past two weeks in Washington have focused greatly on health care. After more than a year of debate on how to improve our health care system, this past Sunday, Nancy Pelosi passed her government takeover of health care. This bill ignores the needs of Americans and instead it is full of bad ideas, sky-high taxes, and impossible regulations and mandates. On March 16th, I spoke out on the House Floor about the government take over of health care.
One of the biggest complaints that I hear from small businesses is the lack of affordable healthcare insurance for their employees. In many cases, employers want to provide health insurance for their employees, but simply cannot afford the cost. These small businesses tell me that in order to keep good employees, they must have competitive benefits.
Abraham Lincoln has many famous sayings, including "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." That doesn't prevent Washington from trying.
This month the House passed legislation that it called a "Jobs Bill." The problem is that Washington cannot create jobs. Real job creation happens when entrepreneurs and innovators start a new business. Not every small business succeeds, but every big business starts out as a small business.
Washington this week continued to ignore the needs of Americans and instead focused on more spending. Instead of piling more red tape and unnecessary taxes on Americans, Congress needs to help keep our economy healthy. Common sense economic and tax policies will help all businesses succeed. As Congress continues to work, I hope that it will focus on legislation that will help create jobs, instead of increasing taxes and the deficit.
Legislation:
The President last week announced that the time for debate had ended on his healthcare bill. After a year of debate, a bipartisan summit and numerous ideas to choose from, you would think there would be a new bipartisan bill ready to pass.
Instead, the Administration and Congress are gearing up to push legislation that is not all that different from where we started. The President believes that a fresh coat of paint will fool the American people into buying this clunker. I do not believe it will.
The latest unemployment numbers were released this morning. The unemployment rate is still 9.7 percent and we lost 36,000 jobs in February. Washington needs to understand that ramming through more regulations and big government programs is not the answer. We need to set the table for economic growth by cutting taxes, regulations, and litigation.
Legislation
In 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill held a summit in Yalta to determine what post war Europe would look like. All agreed that Germany must unconditionally surrender. Each leader though had a different agenda and the summit took a week to complete. And still not everyone was happy.
Summits are held to iron out the differences in details. In Washington last week, there was a summit between the President, Congressional Democrats and Congressional Republicans. Unlike Yalta though, no agreements came out of it.
Washington was consumed by the healthcare summit this week. The President, along with Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders sat down at the Blair House to talk healthcare.