A Wisconsin congressman says he hopes his colleagues will support President Obama’s jobs plan. Democrat Ron Kind of La Crosse says he hopes Republicans “kept an open mind” while listening to the president lay out his plan to a joint session of Congress Thursday. “A lot of the proposals that they heard shouldn’t have been new to them, because they’ve embraced and supported them in the past,” said Kind. “He was scrubbing the list of things we can do in the short term to help give our economy some juice and create jobs . . . by doing it in a bipartisan fashion.
Obama made a point of urging Congress to pass his proposals “right away” — and Kind shares that sense of urgency. “Growth has slowed, hiring has certainly slowed with a zero jobs report in the last month,” he noted. “This has a tendency to feed on itself as far as consumer and investor confidence.”
Kind said the under performing economy is what’s really driving the federal deficit right now. “Revenues have fallen. When people lose their jobs, they go on unemployment, food stamps. Those are spending programs that go up. So until we get this economy back growing and creating jobs, it’s going to be very difficult to deal with these budget deficits that we’re facing.”
