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Vail Daily’s View: Stimulus needs more oversight

Vail Daily Editorial Board
Vail, CO, Colorado
newsroom@vaildaily.com

News broke Tuesday that Wells Fargo Bank, which last year begged for and received about $25 billion in federal bailout money ” our money ” was going ahead with a planned corporate outing to Las Vegas. The company has booked 12 nights at the Wynn and Encore hotels starting Friday.

Wells Fargo has since cancelled the trip, but it and other financial companies continue their tone-deaf ways, from executive bonuses to paying $400 million over 20 years for naming rights at the New York Mets’ new ballpark.

News reports this week indicate that the naming-rights deal may be cancelled, and Bank of America announced



Wednesday it would sell some corporate jets, but the point is that the rushed, ready-fire-aim blast of cash in last year’s “rescue” of the financial industry had some pretty big holes and, it turns out, not nearly enough details.

That’s why we’d be grateful if the Senate took a little time with the current economic “stimulus” bill, which carried a pricetag of ” gulp! ” more than $900 billion the last time we looked.

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The House of Representatives passed the stimulus package so quickly that few, if any, representatives could have read the whole thing. As such, it carries a lot of Christmas-list-type spending and not nearly enough real stimulus. Even backers acknowlege the bill will create only a relative handful of jobs by the end of this year, which means the economy may be on its way back to health by the time the majority of the proposed spending starts to trickle into citizens’ hands.

We’re realists, so we readily acknowlege that a Congress controlled by Democrats is going to pass a bill proposed by one of their own, President Obama.

But we’d like a little oversight built into the front end of the bill. Oh, and if any of our representatives are reading, we’d really like a three-month federal tax holiday on payroll witholding. That would be real stimulus, and it would come in a real hurry.


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