Will You Benefit From President Obama’s Campaign Promises?
COLORADO SPRINGS – Now that the inauguration is over and President Obama is in the White House, how many of his promises to you will be fulfilled? When it comes to higher education, President Obama wants to offer the American Opportunity Tax Credit, taking $4,000 off your college education, in return for 100 hours of community service. For health care, he wants to fund $50-$65 billion in reform by rolling back the Bush tax cuts on those earning more than $250,000 per year. And President Obama is pushing a major stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, to fund transportation projects throughout the United States.
“Anything from highway, utilities to airport projects, transit projects, energy projects,” says Colorado Springs city engineer Cam McNair. “We wrapped in just about everything that we could think of.”
Colorado Springs put together a wish list of projects ready to start in the next six months. The list includes the cost of the project and approximately how many people would need to be hired for the project.
“Widening of I-25, north from the Springs to Monument, I-25 and the Cimarron interchange,” says McNair. “I think the top of the list is the Powers/Stewart interchange on the West Gate of Peterson Air Force Base.”
“It looks like infrastructure that we need to have done and simply haven’t done yet, that might be interpreted as pork-piece legislation and we may not have as good a chance to obtain that type of funding,” says economist Fred Crowley.
Some of President Obama’s campaign promises include increasing the amount available for student financial aid and Pell Grants. Pell Grants are need-based money opportunities for college bound low-income students. Crowley believes funding these areas is more realistic to long-term economic growth than funding local roads and projects. Either way, the federal government doesn’t have the money to pay for many of the President’s ideas.
“They don’t have the money, they have to borrow it,” says Crowley. “They’ll either have to raise taxes or cut budget amounts in other areas to make this happen. No one wants to know about higher taxes, but the government has to pay for this one way or another.”
Crowley says another stimulus package for local communities is really no different than the stimulus package each of us received in 2008.
“The government has to go out and borrow that money, to give it to us, then they’re going to have to get it back from us in the form of taxes, so it really is a short term loan and we’ll have to get the money back from you later, through taxes.”
If Colorado Springs receives federal money for a project, TABOR requires the city to cut that same amount elsewhere in the budget. The city is expected to ask voters in April to change this part of TABOR.
