House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., Monday declared the $787 billion stimulus bill to be an ineffective waste of money and said if President Obama is weighing another round of federal help, it should be focused on small businesses and working families.
Cantor said he will request a meeting with Obama about “redirecting” some of the stimulus funds “that haven’t worked’ in helping the economy and using that money for some kind of second stimulus.
“Congress, the administration, did make a mistake in passing what they hoped would be a stimulus bill,” Cantor said. “It has not produced the jobs we had hoped, it has not produced the economic stimulus we had hoped. Let’s go about it in a much more reasoned fashion.”
Cantor also had harsh words for Vice President Joe Biden, who said Sunday that the administration had misread the economy when it predicted unemployment would peak at 8 percent.
“My sense is that there wasn’t any misreading of the economy, in fact the president and vice president had forecasted economic doom if we did not act quickly,” Cantor said. “What it is they misread was the stimulus bill and got the prescription wrong.”
Cantor said House Republicans advocate a plan that would allow small businesses to excluded 20 percent of their income from taxation, a move he said would help create jobs.
UPDATE: Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly responds to Cantor’s comments:
“Despite the difficult unemployment news, many economists believe that the Recovery Act is beginning to work and the economy would be much worse without Recovery Act funding flowing to families and communities across America,” Daly said. “According to Mark Zandi, of Moody’s Economy.com, without the stimulus, the economy would have lost about 500,000 more jobs in the last three months and the unemployment rate would be 0.3% higher – 9.8 percent. Instead, the job losses, while still far too high, have dropped from 741,000 in January to an average of about 400,000 in May and June.”
