Democrats say that the angry, anti-austerity elections this week that saw voters throw out reform-minded French and Greek leaders could be good news for them, a signal that their plan to spend billions more than the Republicans is a vote winner.
Those elections “confirm the position that many of us have taken, which is the most important thing right now is to sustain and nurture the very fragile economy,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.
“While we have to develop and implement a long-term deficit reduction plan, we should be very careful in designing that, that we do nothing to hurt the fragile economy. In fact we believe that we should make some additional investments,” he added.
For example, he’s pushing for the passage of a massive $50 billion-plus infrastructure spending bonanza offered by President Obama, as well as spending on education, science, research and Middle Class programs. The reason: it would inject money into the economy and cut the 16 percent unemployment in construction and fix roads and bridges.
What’s more, Van Hollen, at a newsmaker breakfast to promote the Democratic alternative to the GOP budget plan, said that the Republican idea to “cut and grow” to economic prosperity is akin to the type of tight-fisted plan the people of France and Greece rejected this week in dumping President Nicolas Sarkozy and Karolos Papoulias.
European nations that followed an approach like the GOP’s cutting “has only made their economic down turns worse, not better.”
Rather than taking a knife to spending to cut the deficits and high unemployment, as some European nations did, he said the Democrats want to address the deficit “in a shared way,” which includes closing tax loopholes for the rich, ending tax break for the wealthy and forcing the “wealthy to share” as well as making some spending cuts.
