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Mixed bag on Obama speech |
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Thursday, 26 February 2009 |
By MIKE BURKHOLDER
Managing Editor
ST. MARYS — As President Barack Obama Tuesday night assured Americans that the nation will recover from its problems, area legislators weighed in on the speech.
“Tonight (Tuesday) President Obama laid out his plan to turn our economy around and help rebuild Ohio’s middle class,” U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement following the speech. “After nearly a decade of wrong-headed policies, Ohio’s unemployment is above the national average. Heath care and food costs are soaring and a college education is becoming out of reach for many young people.”
Brown applauded Obama’s stimulus package, a plan Brown said could save or create 130,000 jobs for Ohioans.
The senator praised Obama’s support of green energy — an area Brown said Ohio could benefit from in the coming years.
“He is following this with a bold plan to address the housing crisis — a crisis that has devastated Ohio communities in every corner of the state,” Brown said. “The president’s plan to invest in green energy is welcome news, especially for the Buckeye State. Ohio has world-class green energy research capabilities, a skilled and talented workforce and a tradition of manufacturing innovation. With the right federal investment, Ohio will lead the way in green-energy development and in establishing a green-energy supply line.”
U.S Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, criticized the stimulus plan and called it “massive spending.” Jordan said government spending was a leading cause of the economy sagging to near-historic levels.
“If massive government spending was the answer to our economic problems, we’d have solved them long ago,” Jordan said in a statement.
“Taxpayer-funded bailouts and expanded federal programs are the wrong way to go. We need to bring a sense of fiscal responsibility back to Congress and I believe the first step is to freeze federal spending at current levels while we find ways to cut.”
Jordan also urged Obama to work with Republicans on correcting wasteful government spending. Instead, Jordan said a fiscally-responsible approach should be brokered among members of Congress.
“This week my office reached out to the Obama administration, ready to go line-by-line through the federal budget with them to cut out the waste,” Jordan said.
“This bipartisan problem was created by big-spending Democrats and big-spending Republicans. I am happy to work with all my fiscally conservative colleagues to show that it can be solved in a bipartisan fashion as well.”
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 March 2009 )
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