The 18 Republicans in the Iowa Senate today outlined a plan they say will "grow" Iowa’s economy.
Senate Republican Leader Paul McKinley of Chariton said the Iowa legislature should pass a bill that gives a business that creates a new job a state tax credit. "We’ve been in session for several weeks now and we’ve managed to talk about bicycle bills. We’ve talked about job-killing bills," McKinley said. "We’ve talked about a host of things and we have 80,000 Iowans out of work and we believe it’s time to talk about creating jobs."
McKinley and the 17 other Republicans in the senate say the state should hire an ombudsman to champion small business issues and they want to appoint a new state task force to focus on small business issues. They’d call the task force "SMUG" — which stands for "Solutions to Minimize Unreasonable Government."
Democrats occupy 32 of the 50 seats in the Iowa Senate, giving Democrats control of the debate agenda, so there’s little chance the proposals McKinley and his fellow Republicans touted today will become law. "We hope that the power of persuasion and the power of this presentation will prevail and that common sense will indicate that, ‘Hey, look! We’d better start talking about jobs,’" McKinley said during a news conference in his statehouse office, "and frankly we had better start talking about jobs because Iowans are losing them at an alarming rate."
McKinley’s also critical of the federal economic stimulus package Democrats in congress and President Obama passed last month. McKinley said it creates work, not jobs.