House of Cards Teeters

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Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has a message he wants to “take…directly to the people.” At a recent Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing, Senator DeMint spoke about President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill that has just been passed in the House and will soon fight its way through the Senate. Senator DeMint focused on private business as the way to end the recession and help the economy grow.

Senator DeMint said that he is “…trying to stir up interest and get good information out there.” His good information is that the President and members of Congress do not know what they are doing with regards to business. With regards to businesses opening new areas and thereby creating more jobs, he says, “The people who really create the jobs would laugh at this [the stimulus plan] because what they need is to be able to look out five, ten, fifteen years to see a predictable business environment where if they make reasonable risks, they can expect a reasonable profit.”

The stimulus package is not Senator DeMint’s idea of good reform: “This is not change you can believe in; this is business as usual if I’ve ever seen it in Washington.” He argues that “it’s like everybody’s wish list that they had in their file drawer—they pulled it out, they stuck it in here, and it’s just a massive government spending program.” He asserts, “Anything’s better than spending.”

Senator DeMint argues that the government is at fault for the recession. He claims, “The market is locked down because the government has created more uncertainty…If you look at our tax system and regulatory system, banking and credit system, all in which the government has created more uncertainty, you can point a finger directly at Congress, the last administration, and this administration, and what really is causing the breakdown in our economy.”

The solution, Senator DeMint says, is to stop spending: “businesses don’t know what their tax rate is going to be; they don’t know what the credit market is going to be like because we’re throwing money around and no one knows what is going to happen. If we weren’t throwing any money around, and the government wasn’t acting, the market would know what would happen. The people with bad assets would dump them somehow, they would take some price for them, they would revalue, and they would start over. But right now everyone’s waiting to see if the government would help them…what we need right now is for businesses to look out and say, ‘If I invest, if I take a risk, then I can expect at least a little shot at a return.’” He argues that the best action Congress can take to help this come about is cut taxes, but they will not do it unless the people make them. He calls for people to work together in “get[ting] some noise up about this.” He says that the point is “to take back a country, trying to reestablish a constitutional government, and trying to end this panicked knee-jerk takeover by the federal government.”

Heather Latham is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.