Multi-Millionaire Congressman Tom Price: Extend Bush Tax Cuts for Billionaires, Refuse Emergency Assistance for Victims of the Bush Recession
www.americansunitedforchange.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Lauren Weiner, 202-470-5870
November 9, 2010 Jeremy Funk, 202-470-5878
Multi-Millionaire Congressman Tom Price: Extend Bush Tax Cuts for Billionaires, Refuse Emergency Assistance for Victims of the Bush Recession
Washington DC – In what can only be described as a desperate political stunt, Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, has announced that his party is now getting serious about “tackling spending.” And to prove it, the top item on the list of their things to cut is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) emergency fund – a fund which already expired last month – a fund that helped 250,000 struggling Americans find work in the Bush recession – a fund that, if extended, would amount to a $2.5 billion drop in the bucket while saving thousands more jobs. Yet at the same time, Price, the 32nd richest member of Congress, continues to be a passionate and hypocritical advocate for permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, which would blast a nearly $700 billion hole in the deficit in the next 10 years and trillions more in the decades to come.
As Think Progress pointed out, Congressman Price is using fuzzy math when it comes to the emergency fund, to put it mildly: “[The crux of the issue is that eliminating the TANF emergency fund will save exactly zero dollars, because the program has already expired! It was funded at $5 billion for two years, and ended on September 30, 2010. It’s over, and there is no money for Price to save. Advocates, as well as the Obama administration, have asked that Congress fund the program for an additional year for $2.5 billion. Price multiplied that over ten years to come up with his ludicrous pronouncement that he would save $25 billion by cutting the program.”
And as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, “The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future.”
Statement from Tom McMahon, Executive Director, Americans United for Change: “Providing a taste of the upside-down, special interest-driven priorities the incoming Republican majority will pursue come January, Congressman Price is already pledging to stand in the way of basic assistance for the many victims of the Bush recession at the same time he’s demanding more Bush tax breaks for the privileged few – more tax breaks for the rich that failed miserably to create jobs. The fact is, the TANF emergency fund has been an effective lifeline that has prevented thousands of Americans families from ending up on the street, and Congress should act now to extend the funding to help thousands more Americans find work and weather this storm.
“In multi-millionaire Tom Price’s isolated country club world, the poorest of the poor have had it too good the past two years, where “able-bodied” Americans have grown just too “dependent” on government to bother looking for work. In the real world, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening and lines wrapping around unemployment offices across the country. Considering Congressman Price helped enable the Bush economic policies that cost many of these Americans their jobs, it takes some nerve to now blame them for the situation they’re in.”