[Vision2020] Otter Will Accept $1 Billion Stimulus

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (March 7, 2009) Spokesman Review.

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Otter will accept $1 billion stimulus
Citing all-or-none conditions, he’ll ‘hold my nose’
Betsy Z. Russell / Staff writer 

BOISE – Despite national reports that Idaho Gov. Butch Otter was among a 
few governors who would reject federal stimulus money, Otter said Friday 
that he’ll take most – if not all – of the cash.

“I’m gonna hold my nose, and I’m gonna take it,” he told the Idaho Press 
Club.

The transportation money, in particular, carries strings that require the 
state to accept all or none of it, Otter said. “If you reject one dollar 
of that, they take it all – so you’ve got to reject all of it or none of 
it.”

The remainder of Idaho’s roughly $1 billion in stimulus funds is mostly 
for either education or health and human services, and Otter said he’ll 
rely on guidance from state schools Superintendent Tom Luna and state 
Health and Welfare Director Dick Armstrong on those funds. Luna is calling 
for accepting “every penny” of the education funds, and Armstrong built 
his Medicaid budget around the anticipated federel help.

“I’ve never said that I wouldn’t take any of the stimulus package,” Otter 
said. “It’d been my druthers that they didn’t do it in the first place, 
and didn’t do it the way they did it. You know, if you’d put it all into 
jobs creation or jobs retention, to me that would have been much more 
acceptable.”

But with the money on its way, Otter said he’s ready to take it, providing 
it doesn’t obligate the state to replace the federal funds when they end 
by raising state taxes. The education and health and welfare funds Idaho 
stands to receive add up to $625 million, Otter said. Replacing that would 
require a 50 percent increase in Idaho’s sales tax – from 6 center a 
dollar to 9 – or a boost in the state income tax rate from the current 7.8 
percent to 11.5 percent.

On Monday, Otter will meet for the first time with a committee he’s 
appointed to help him analyze the stimulus, including three former 
governors and three former state budget directors.

“I’m a long way from believing that the government should always be in a 
position to spend a lot of money in order to stimulate the economy,” said 
Otter, a first-term Republican governor who’s political philosophy has 
long had a libertarian bent. As Idaho’s 1st District congressman, he was 
one of only three House Republicans to vote against the Patriot Act on 
civil liberties grounds.

Otter said that well before the stimulus bill passed, he co-signed a 
letter with two other governors “to say, ‘This is not a good idea.’ ” 

Then, he said, he and several other governors asked, “If we don’t take the 
money, can you then absolve our states from having to be in a position to 
pay it back? … For instance in Idaho, I think we pay about $4.5 billion in 
federal income tax, our citizens do. So if I don’t take a billion dollars, 
why wouldn’t you give the citizens of Idaho a billion-dollar holiday for 
one year off their income tax?”

Amid laughter, Otter said, “Well, they didn’t buy that.”

He said he also looked into whether he could “barter these funds” with 
other states, say, trading highway landscaping money to another state that 
wants it in exchange for bridge-replacement or concrete and asphalt money 
for Idaho. 

“They said, ‘No, you can’t barter it either,’ ” he said.

So he’s taking it.

Asked by reporters if he agreed with conservative radio host Rush 
Limbaugh’s recent statements that he hopes President Barack Obama will 
fail, Otter said no.

Otter, who said he hadn’t heard Limbaugh’s speech, said, “I don’t share 
that. Spending billions of dollars and getting nothing from it … I think 
it’d deepen and lengthen and maybe even go into a depression if we failed.

“So for my part, I’m gonna do all I can to get as many people working and 
get as many people confident that they can participate actively in this 
economy by getting ’em jobs on building bridges and roads and water 
systems for rural Idaho. … I think we can create a lot of jobs. A person 
gets a job, that whole family suddenly gains confidence in tomorrow. … I 
believe that’s the kind of hope everybody had for the idea of the stimulus 
package when it was first mentioned.”

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Seeya at the Intolerista Wingding, Moscow.

http://www.MoscowCares.com/Wingding

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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