George S. May Business Blog

Americans for Prosperity issues no stimulus petition, receives massive reponse

Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing political advocacy group, has started a petition against the stimulus bill, and it  is rolling. In fact, the Web site of Americans for Prosperity and its petition site nostimulus.com have received so much traffic that they are currently unavailable.

The Americans for Prosperity group is against the stimulus plan for its exorbitant spending. Here is an excerpt from the Americans for Prosperity petition:

“Congress should not enact an expensive spending bill under the pretense of stimulus or recovery. We cannot spend our way to prosperity, and such an expansion of the federal government will put a crushing burden on taxpayers in the long-term.” The petition is said to be very close in nature to one backed by Senator John McCain.

The backlash has been so great from Americans for Prosperity’s petition that it has jolted President Barack Obama into campaigning across the US defending the package. This morning he was in Elkhart, Indiana.

“We can’t afford to wait. We can’t wait to see and hope for the best,” declared Obama. “We can’t posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us in into this mess in the first place.” Tonight he has a prime time news conference planned and tomorrow he will be in Florida to continue the campaign.

If this reaction is coming as a surprise to anyone then they have not been paying attention to what has been happening on Capitol Hill his past week. The whole ‘bi-partisan solution’ approach ahs been absolutely trashed and thrown out the window. Democrats and Republicans have been at each other all week and their main focus has been the spending vs. tax cuts debate. Really, we could have seen this coming from the day after Obama was elected. He called a meeting between Democratic and Republican Senators to try to work out the differences in the bill. Some common ground was met on semi-pertinent issues, but the meeting basically ended with Obama whistling to the tune of ‘on some matters we have ideological differences. I won, so in this case I think I trump you’. Can you guess what those ideological differences were?

Anyway, my point is if Republican Senators have problems with the bill, then obviously it will trickle down to the tax-payers.  As information from the bill is released to the public, right wing supporters are going to express the same views as their respective lawmakers. In fact, generally the reaction from tax-payers tends to be exponentially avid as by the time the information gets to them it has been misconstrued and exaggerated sparking an equal response. I urge everyone signing a petition similar in nature, to do their homework and be sure they know exactly what their vote represents.

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