Washington – Michigan Congressman Dave Camp raised doubts and highlighted confused realities of the Democrat Spending Bill at today’s Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing, held at the Heritage Foundation.
Camp compared provisions in the Spending Bill and the recently passed SCHIP Bill, calling their contradictions ‘absurd.’ “You’re too rich to get a tax cut, but your not poor enough to get health care for free,” he said, referring to Democrat’s refusals (in Ways and Means Committee and on the House Floor) to cut taxes on unemployment benefits for those who earn $50,000 a year. However, under SCHIP, families making $84,000 a year or less qualify for free healthcare at taxpayer expense, a regulation that eliminates private healthcare for 2.4 million individuals, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“Clearly, this is a thinly and poorly veiled attempt to continue the Democrat march towards a single-payer, government-run, taxpayer-funded health care system,” said a memo released at the Briefing by Camp’s staff.
The blitzkrieg tactics by Democrats to disguise agenda as “stimulus” has not gone unnoticed for long, however. Websites and movements like ReadTheStimulus.org, which allows anyone to read and comment on the currently 1,588 page Spending Bill, have unveiled the impetus behind the left’s calls for urgency.
Camp also looked ahead at the unintended consequences of the Spending Bill:
“[The Democratic] proposal really accelerates a dangerous trend, and that is that people are receiving back more in income and payroll taxes than they are paying in. They do that with 7 million more people under their proposal. Yet we hear that this is an era of personal responsibility, where everyone’s going to have pull on the oar on the boat and we’re all going to have to be a participant. Yet, what they’re saying tin their bill is ‘you’re going to get more back than you pay in.’ And that is a transfer payment, not tax relief.”
Camp recently made headlines for his outing of the Joint Committee on Taxation at a hearing on the Hill last month over the amount of jobs created by Obama’s Spending Bill.
