[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Page 3586]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              THE STIMULUS

  Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I wish to speak briefly. I know my friend 
from Oklahoma is going to come back and speak, but I wish to make a 
couple comments. I know there has been a deal reached on the stimulus 
bill. 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. This is their credit card we are 
running up, and they are going to have to pay higher taxes into the 
future.
  Once we get the bill, we are going to have to take a close look over 
the next day or two and go through it. It is very disappointing, it 
appears, that this stimulus bill is going to do very little, if 
anything, to fix the housing problem in the United States. My home 
State of Nevada leads the country in foreclosures. We understand what 
other States are starting to go through or just recently have been 
going through, and how severely it affects the economy. It is 
unfortunate that the stimulus bill that is supposed to fix the economy 
is not addressing the No. 1 problem we have in the United States.

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