WASHINGTON – Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) offered long term solutions for the ailing economy today at the Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing held at The Heritage Foundation. Before a packed house, with FOX News cameras rolling, DeMint clarified what is necessary to create economic growth: providing an environment in which businesses are ready, willing and able to take economic risks.
“The [businesses] who really create the jobs would laugh at [the current stimulus plan], because what they need is to be able to look out 5, 10, 15 years to see a predictable business environment where if they take reasonable risks they can expect a reasonable profit. Right now, in our economy, the risk-reward balance is out of balance. What we have now is uncertainty, and it’s uncertainty that causes recessions,” he said.
DeMint recommended the two-part strategy outlined by Heritage’s J.D. Foster and Bill Beach, in which permanent, across the board cuts of individual and corporate tax rates would overcome government-induced marketplace instability.
Writing in a January 22nd op-ed in The State , DeMint called the Pelosi-Reid-Obama Debt plan “junk food for our starving economy. We don’t need another check-in-the-mail debacle, business credits that expire after a single year or special-interest corporate welfare.”
Perhaps most dangerous of all is the precedent being established that spending=stimulus. If government spending solved recessions, why would there ever be recessions? Governments would simply spend their way out of them.
“This is not change you can believe in,” DeMint said. “This is business as usual if I’ve ever seen it in Washington.”
