Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat, says his advice as the president makes his speech on his jobs plan to shoot for something that’s going to make a major impact. “Try for something big, because the Republicans oppose it anyway,” Harkin says, “You might as well capture the imagination of the American people, show some vision, show some boldness.”
Harkin has complained that Republicans want to “give tax breaks to the rich,” and stuck with that theme again as he talked about what he wants the president to do. Harkin says he wants to see the president talk about “rebuilding the middle class in America” and what happened in the last 30 years with the “disparity in income in America and what that’s doing to the middle class.”
He says the president has to say there won’t be any economic recovery without recovery of the middle class and that’s where the focus should be. Some say another stimulus package is the wrong way to go, but Harkin says the first stimulus package worked to an extend.
Harkin says the Congressional Budget Office estimated in an August 30th report that the last stimulus package increased employment between one million and two-point-nine million jobs as of June. “So all the evidence that’s coming in is that clearly it had an effect, not enough, because the recession was deeper and longer than anybody had anticipated,” Harkin said. Harkin made his comments during his weekly conference call with reporters.