On one of the Sunday chat shows, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl suggested that the United States just stop spending all the stimulus money and put it toward health care or deficit reduction.
And that, in turn, led to some outrage by Glenn Hamer of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, who says it’s wrong to “bully” Arizona:
Regardless of how one feels about the stimulus funding, it is wrong for officials to play politics with the allocation of dollars for federal spending programs that Arizona citizens ultimately pay though our federal taxes (or perhaps more accurately, future taxes).
It is one thing to joust with Sen. Kyl over his position, but it is an entirely different matter for Cabinet secretaries to write letters to the Chief Executive of a state and threaten funding if support isn’t provided. Once a law is passed, it needs to be fairly and impartially administered.
We don’t disagree with Hamer’s point about fairly administering the law. But no one from the Obama administration is suggesting that the law not be fairly administered. What they’re doing is making a simple point: States want (and in many cases, need) the stimulus money to balance the budget. If we follow Kyl’s advice, much of that money will go away. Let’s see if Brewer thinks that’s a good idea.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.
the range is very wrong on this one. Obama was trying to bully arizona. Obama stands behind dictators and dont give a damn about the little guy. He wouldny know the truth if it jumped up and bit him on his arrogent butt.
Obama is letting the GOP have their cake and eat it too, and showing them up them for the loud hypocrites they are. Only the same menaces who blew apart the economy with useless tax cuts would bother criticizing an economic package they can’t begin to understand, yet take the money anyway. Obama just showed the emperor Kyl has no clothes.