I appreciate President Obama’s desire to see a bipartisan stimulus package to help all the American families who are hurting. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are using the so called stimulus package to give new meaning to big government spending.

We cannot spend our way out of the economic troubles that we are in. First, we need to stop racking up huge sums of debt on the nation’s credit card and passing the debt off for our children and grandchildren to pay off. As the president said during the campaign, we need to go through the budget line by line and eliminate programs that are not working. Now is not the time to be creating new government spending programs.

I cannot say this enough--we cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity. We should be planting the seeds of real prosperity for people by providing real and meaningful tax relief, supporting our small businesses and ending the practice of placing more debt on our children and grandchildren. The package that Pelosi and her friends passed like week does little to help hard-working Americans like those in the 9th District who are struggling every day to provide for their families. In fact, this spending spree will have minimal immediate impact on improving our struggling economy.

The cold hard facts are that the Pelosi spending proposal will cost every resident in our district more than $2,700, for a total cost to all district taxpayers of $1.8 billion. And what do you get for your money? How about $600 million to help to buy new cars for government workers; $150 million for repairs to the Smithsonian Institution, the same institution that spent $4,000 for a heater for the lap pool of the most recent director, $31,000 on designer upholstery and $2,535 to clean a chandelier; and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, which spent $190,000 for various artistic endeavors in Nancy Pelosi’s district of San Francisco.

The Republican alternative that I support would provide an immediate boost to our economy. In fact, according to estimates based on modeling created by the president’s own chief economic adviser, the Republican plan would create more than six million new jobs in the next two years. When compared to the Democratic proposal, the Republican plan provides twice the jobs at half the cost.

The Republican plan is bipartisan, simple and responsible. It provides real tax cuts for working families. Under the Republican plan, a married couple filing jointly could save up to $3,200 a year in taxes. Allowing taxpayers to keep more of their hard-earned money is the best way to stimulate our economy.

The Republican plan also suspends the tax taken from unemployment benefits, provides a tax deduction for purchasing health care and says that today’s tax cuts will not lead to future tax increases. These are reasonable proposals that will provide a significant and immediate boost to our economy.

These are good ideas, and in the spirit of President Obama’s bipartisan outreach, they should be considered.

I remain committed to working with the president and Congress to support a true stimulus bill that will help spur job growth and allow American families to keep more of their hard-earned tax dollars.