Iowa lawmakers are meeting again in Des Moines, but not much has happened. There’s been a lot of talk, but very little action so far. It wasn’t ’til four hours after the legislature convened that a Senate committee began debating a bill that would simplify Iowans’ income taxes and cut ’em by about 310-million dollars. The Senate Republican plan for financing and distributing a new state economic development fund hasn’t even cleared a committee yet. Governor Tom Vilsack’s already saying it doesn’t go far enough. The House — during the regular legislative session — passed its own plans on those issues, so House members are just sitting around, waiting for the Senate to make some decisions. Senator Mike Connolly, a democrat from Dubuque, this morning challenged Republicans to act quickly. Connolly says Republicans consider themselves “fiscal conservatives” yet the Senate Republicans stalled during the regular session and forced the special session, at a cost to the state of 36-thousand dollars a day. Connolly says “the entire state of Iowa wants us to get after this” and pass the “Iowa Values” fund to spur economic development.
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