affirmative action

Fact Checkers: Obama Is Lying About Health Care

by Hans Bader on August 12, 2009 · 1 comment

in Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

USA Today caught Obama telling three fibs about health care, such as falsely claiming that “under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”

Shikha Dalmia lists “Obama’s Top 5 Health-Care Lies” in Forbes Magazine.

“Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage. . .

“Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits. . .

“Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector. . .

“Lie Four: A public plan won’t be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly. . .

“Lie Five: Patients don’t have to fear rationing. . .”

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has criticized provisions of ObamaCare for mandating racial set-asides that may be unconstitutional. ObamaCare would reinforce the worst features of the status quo, while exploding health-care costs, say Washington Post columnists.

Fran Smith lists a dozen constructive health-care reforms that could make health cheaper and more widely available — none of which Obama has even considered.

In the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey lists another 8 obvious and long overdue health-care reforms that Obama has refused to consider that would make health-care cheaper and expand access to health-care, such as:

•?Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

•?Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

•?Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

•?Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

•?Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

•?Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. ObamaCare will take away 5 important freedoms, notes a CNN commentary. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator list what they think are the “Top Ten Reasons Obamacare Is Wrong for America,” noting that “millions will lose their current insurance,” those who won’t will probably pay “more in premiums,” and small business owners will pay “higher taxes” than in “Europe,” and that Obamacare will “increase the deficit” and could lead to “taxpayer-funded abortions” and “rationing.”

Civil Rights Commission Criticizes Obama Health-Care Plan’s Racially-Discriminatory Affirmative Action

by Hans Bader on August 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Healthcare, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says Obama’s health-care plan is racially discriminatory. The House health-care bill backed by Obama is filled with “sections that factor in race when awarding billions in contracts, scholarships and grants” and give “preferential treatment to minority students for scholarships.” Taxpayers of all races will end up paying more because of these arbitrary racial preferences. The Civil Rights Commission has concluded that this racial discrimination is unjustified, and that it will neither “reduce health care disparities among racial and ethnic groups,” nor “improve health care in underserved areas.”

Earlier, I wrote about other provisions backed by Obama that would mandate affirmative action in health care to promote “cultural competence” — whatever that means — and fund left-wing community organizers. “ObamaCare” also contains preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but can access its benefits due to lack of eligibility verification safeguards. The safeguards were blocked by liberal lawmakers allied with Obama.

Historically, affirmative action did not apply to health-care in general, only to employment, education, and government contracts, although Obama has advocated expanding it to health-care in his published writings. When critics of affirmative action passed state constitutional amendments banning racial preferences in California, Michigan, and Nebraska, they applied such bans only to “employment,” “education,” and “contracting,” because it never occurred to them that anyone would advocate affirmative action elsewhere. But Obama seems determined to go further than any other president in pushing affirmative action. In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” he advocated race-based “affirmative action” in the form of “targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities between minorities and whites.”

Earlier, the Civil Rights Commission chided the Obama Administration for letting an Obama poll-watcher and Democratic official get away with racist voter intimidation against non-black voters in Philadelphia (even though they were caught on videotape wielding a nightstick and using racial epithets) and for backing a hate-crimes bill designed to allow people who have been found innocent of hate crimes in state court to be reprosecuted all over again in federal court.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. ObamaCare will take away 5 important freedoms, notes a CNN commentary. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

“Join Your Fellow Pervs for Some Explicit, Twisted Fun” Courtesy of Obama’s Stimulus Package

by Hans Bader on August 11, 2009 · 2 comments

in Economy, Healthcare, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

“Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun,” urged a recipient of more than $25,000 from Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which received the money through the National Endowment for the Arts. The stimulus is also being spent on “nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night ‘pervert’ revues,” and “pornographic horror films.” While providing taxpayer funds for “numerous” sexually perverse projects, and lots of money for welfare, the stimulus package has done little for America’s roads and bridges.

Why? Because feminist leaders complained that rebuilding roads and bridges would employ working-class men, who have borne the brunt of the recession, rather than women or the “sexually diverse.” Unemployment is very high among transportation and construction workers, who are overwhelmingly male. The vast majority of people who have lost their jobs in the current recession are male — 82%. But the stimulus package is not aimed at helping them. In response to demands from feminist leaders, the Obama Administration rewrote the stimulus package to largely exclude them, as Christina Hoff Sommers has chronicled at length.

The Obama Administration purged the stimulus package of most of the investments in roads and bridges originally suggested by economists, and filled it instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

As Christina Hoff Sommers points out, “Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period.”

But when the Administration floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

The Obama Administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

“A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Less than 6 percent of it ended up going to transportation.

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. The stimulus package largely repeals the welfare-reform law passed by Congress in 1996.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

The stimulus package also imposes on states racial set-aside requirements and prevailing-wage requirements, which increase the cost to taxpayers of government contracts. The prevailing-wage requirements will inflate the cost of state construction and transportation projects by at least $17 billion. Racial set-asides also are very costly to taxpayers.

Racial quotas, set-asides, and affirmative action are also mandated by Obama’s health-care plan, drawing criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reports today’s Washington Times. Earlier, the Commission criticized the Obama Administration for turning a blind eye to racist voter intimidation by black panthers, including an Obama poll watcher and Democratic official who used a nightstick and racial epithets to drive white voters away from a Philadelphia polling place.

Deficit Rises $880 Billion to Record $1.3 Trillion, Due to Massive, Unprecedented Government Spending

by Hans Bader on August 8, 2009 · 9 comments

in Economy, Employment, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

The federal budget deficit has already risen by $880 billion to an unprecedented $1.3 trillion. Most of the increase is attributable to recent increases in federal spending, including Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in “the long run,” and which ended welfare reform, destroyed thousands of jobs in the export sector, and substituted welfare for productive investments.

Ironically, Obama had campaigned on a promise, since broken, to make a “net spending cut” in federal spending.

The increase in the deficit is driven largely by reckless federal spending, even though federal tax revenue fell at the fastest rate since 1932 thanks to the recession.

The Obama Administration wants to pile on even more federal spending, including a health-care “reform” proposal predicted to cost at least $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). In reality, Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted, the way past health-care expansions always have.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains affirmative action and subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but may be able to access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

Obama Health-Care Plan Contains Affirmative-Action and Subsidies for Left-Wing Community Organizers Like ACORN

by Hans Bader on August 5, 2009 · 4 comments

in Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The massively-costly health-care reform bills backed by Obama are riddled with provisions mandating “preference” for organizations that exhibit “cultural competency,” a politically-correct code word for a focus on minorities. So racial preferences, not cutting costs or expanding coverage, may end up being the top priority in some cases.

That’s true even for the version of the health-care bill recently passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the least liberal of the 3 House committees responsible for fleshing out the details of ObamaCare. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) says that the health-care bill may become substantially more liberal by the time it passes the House in Autumn.

Mickey Kaus, a Democrat and long-time supporter of universal health-care coverage, calls these affirmative-action provisions special “interest group time bombs” that will turn off moderate voters and may spawn unforeseen problems. John Rosenberg, an expert on antidiscrimination laws, calls them “the ACORN enrichment provision,” saying they will funnel money to left-wing community organizers like ACORN.

ACORN, a beneficiary of the economy-shrinking $800 billion stimulus package, helped spawn the mortgage crisis by promoting “liar loans.” It has also engaged in extensive financial fraud and vote fraud. The Obama Administration has chosen ACORN to help conduct the 2010 census, which will be used to reallocate seats in Congress.

Obama once represented ACORN, which pressures banks to make risky low-income loans. Government pressure on banks to make low-income loans was a key reason for the mortgage meltdown and the financial crisis. Obama’s recent financial-regulation proposals would create a new bureaucratic agency to pressure banks to make even more risky low-income loans.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises. And Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted.

The health-care “reform” bills Obama backs wrongly exempt illegal aliens from the health-insurance taxes and obligations imposed on citizens, effectively giving them preferential treatment.

While America’s health-care system is very expensive, it is much better at treating and detecting common forms of cancer than most European health-care systems. The Administration’s health-care proposals put these successes in jeopardy, yet they would increase health-care costs even further, while failing to provide health-care coverage as cheap or as universal as in Europe.

Obama’s support for racial preferences isn’t limited to health care. The Administration is also winking at racist voter intimidation, by letting the racist, antisemitic New Black Panther Party get away with using racial epithets and physical intimidation to drive white voters away from the polls in Philadelphia.

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of White and Hispanic Firefighters in Ricci v. DeStefano

by Hans Bader on June 29, 2009 · 3 comments

in Economy, Employment, Features, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Zeitgeist

The Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of white and Hispanic firefighters, who were denied promotions when the City of New Haven threw out the exam they scored highest on, citing the fact that no black firefighter scored high enough. In Ricci v. DeStefano, the Court reversed a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, including Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whom Obama has nominated to the Supreme Court.

The appeals court, in an unpublished ruling designed to avoid scrutiny, had held that the City could throw out the test simply because the test excluded more blacks than whites, meaning it gave rise to a “prima facie” case of unintentional “disparate impact” discrimination (disparate-impact is when a test excludes substantially more members of one race or gender than another). The Supreme Court held that this was not reason enough to use race, at least where the test measures useful job skills.

“Frank Ricci, a firefighter in New Haven, Conn., worked hard, played by the rules, and earned a promotion to fire lieutenant. But the city denied him the promotion because he is not black. Ricci sued, along with 16 other whites and one Hispanic firefighter. After a 7-6, near-party-line vote by a federal Appeals Court to dismiss the lawsuit,” the Supreme Court decided to review the case. A three-judge panel including Judge Sotomayor had “dismissed” of Ricci’s case in an unpublished ruling, “in a process so peculiar as to fan suspicions that some or all of the judges were embarrassed by the ugliness of the actions that they were blessing and were trying to sweep the case quietly under the rug, perhaps to avoid Supreme Court review or public criticism, or both,” says the National Journal.

The lower courts have divided on how much public employers can use race-based affirmative action to offset tests or selection criteria with “disparate impact” without violating the Constitution. Some courts, like the moderate Seventh Circuit, have said that that public employers can’t use race at all to offset such tests or criteria, since the purpose of affirmative action is to remedy constitutional violations, and the Constitution (unlike some civil rights statutes) isn’t violated by disparate impact, but rather requires a showing of racism or intentional discrimination. Others, like the more liberal First Circuit, say that race can be used to offset tests’ “disparate impact” even if the test measures useful job skills and thus is “job-related,” as long as substantially more minorities fail it than whites — meaning that the “disparate impact” is only a “prima facie” or half-proven case, which doesn’t actually rise to the level of illegality (the civil-rights statute, Title VII, only bans tests with a “disparate impact” if they are not “job-related”).

In the Ricci case decided today, the Supreme Court took a middle path, saying that a mere racial imbalance (or “prima facie” case of disparate impact) is not enough to use race, but that disparate impact can be enough reason if there is “strong evidence” that the test not only excludes more blacks than whites, but also is not “job related” in the sense of requiring knowledge irrelevant to the job. Since the City of New Haven had no strong evidence that the test was not job-related, its decision to throw out the test was illegal.

However, it cautioned that this standard only limited statutory challenges to affirmative action, as opposed to Constitutional challenges, applying this standard to Title VII claims so that employers won’t face a discrimination claim no matter what they do (for intentional discrimination against whites if they throw out the test, or unintentional “disparate impact” discrimination if they keep the test that no blacks passed). It said that public employers might face additional requirements before they could use race under the Constitution (which, unlike Title VII, does not recognize “unintentional” discrimination or “disparate-impact” liability): “Our statutory holding does not address the constitutionality of the measures taken here in purported compliance with Title VII. We also do not hold that meeting the strong-basis-in-evidence standard would satisfy the Equal Protection Clause in a future case. As we explain below,because respondents have not met their burden under Title VII, we need not decide whether a legitimate fear of disparate impact is ever sufficient to justify discriminatory treatment under the Constitution.”

Thus, the Court’s decision does not abrogate the rulings of the federal appeals court in Chicago, the Seventh Circuit, which ruled in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997) Biondo v. Chicago, 382 F.3d 680, 681 (7th Cir. 2004), and Builders Association v. Chicago, that to defeat a constitutional lawsuit brought by victims of affirmative action or reverse discrimination, a public employer cannot rely on a test or selection criterion’s disparate impact. For example, Chief Judge Posner ruled in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997), that to use race to favor minorities, a school district must show that it once “discriminated intentionally” against them, since that is “the only kind of discrimination that violates the equal protection clause.”

Today’s decision does, however, effectively abrogate court rulings saying that a test’s mere “prima facie” disparate impact is enough to justify using race, given that the Supreme Court in United Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193, 206 fn. 6 (1979) said that the limits on affirmative action are tougher under the Constitution than under civil-rights statutes like Title VII, which was “not intended to incorporate” the tougher “commands of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.” (The rulings allowing race to be used to offset tests’ racial imbalances are also hard to square with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that race-based affirmative action is supposed to be a “last resort,” see Bartlett v. Strickland, 129 S.Ct. 1231, 1247 (2009)).

Justice Alito, in his concurring opinion, noted that there was an additional, independent ground for reversing the appeals court decision throwing out the white and Hispanic firefighters’ lawsuit: that the whole issue of tests’ alleged “disparate impact” was a red herring and a “pretext” because the appeals court ignored evidence that the City’s motivation was not a sincere desire to avoid “disparate impact” but rather just an excuse to engage in racial favoritism towards blacks.

Even if the City had legitimate motives for throwing out the test, if it also had illegitimate or mixed motives, that would render it liable under Title VII (and potentially the Constitution), under the Supreme Court’s “mixed-motives” precedents. (See Mount Healthy Bd. of Educ. v. Doyle (1977), and Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989)). The city could only rely on the test’s “disparate impact” if that were its “actual purpose” for using race, and could not use any problems with the test as a justification if they “did not actually precipitate the use of race.” (See Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U.S. 899, 908 n.4, 910 (1996)).

Stimulus = Welfare + Quotas + Corruption

by Hans Bader on June 20, 2009 · 3 comments

in Economy, Employment, International, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is now being used to force states to adopt racial quotas in government contracts, even if their state constitution or civil-rights laws forbid such quotas. Slate’s Mickey Kaus reports that “CalTrans, the huge state agency that spends billions in federal highway construction funds, ‘sets a quota of having 6.75 percent of contracts go to women or members of a targeted group–African American, Asian-Pacific American, and Native American.’”

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against welfare reform as an Illinois legislator.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

At least four states (California, Michigan, Nebraska, and Louisiana) have state constitutions that ban racial set asides, but most of those bans contain exceptions for racial set-asides that are requirements for receiving federal funds. No such exception exists to the California Equal Rights Amendment, which was construed in Connerly v. State Personnel Board (2001) to bar gender-based set-asides even when they are permitted under federal law.

The EEOC: “The Fox Guarding the Henhouse”

by Hans Bader on March 31, 2009 · 4 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Sanctimony

“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation’s workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled.”

The EEOC has a much worse record of labor and civil-rights violations than most corporations and agencies with a similar-size workforce.

The EEOC was found guilty of systematic, illegal, reverse discrimination (discrimination against white males) in Jurgens v. Thomas, 29 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1561, 1982 WL 409 (N.D.Tex.1982). When he was head of the EEOC, Clarence Thomas tried but apparently failed to end the reverse discrimination that went on in the agency.

The EEOC also has had a lot of sexual harassment lawsuits against it (and I am talking about real sexual harassment, not weak claims based on a couple of off-color jokes, the sort of trivial thing the EEOC itself might unsuccessfully sue a private employer over).See, e.g., Spain v. Gallegos, 26 F.3d 439 (3rd Cir.1994).

In short, the EEOC is like “the fox guarding the henhouse.” See John Berlau, “Discrimination at the Opportunity Commission,” Insight, May 19, 1997.

The EEOC continued to discriminate against white male employees, including those white males, like attorney Joseph Ray Terry, that it sent to defend affirmative action in court. See, e.g., Terry v. Gallegos, 926 F.Supp. 679 (W.D. Tenn. 1996) (court ruled that agency discriminated against attorney Joseph Ray Terry, who has long argued in court on behalf of affirmative action).

Ironically, Terry, after winning his reverse discrimination suit, argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 preempted California’s state constitutional amendment banning reverse discrimination. I and the other attorneys who represented the amendment’s sponsors successfully argued that it did not. Although a trial judge agreed with him, the federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit overturned that decision, and upheld the amendment, known as Prop. 209. That court also rejected claims by the ACLU that Prop. 209, by mandating equal treatment for whites, Asians, and males, and thus prohibiting many forms of affirmative action, itself violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. See Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson, 122 F.3d 692 (9th Cir. 1997). (The ACLU also argues that free speech, privacy, jury trial, and other constitutional rights need to be restricted to protect minorities).

The world would be a better place if the EEOC spent more time rooting out discrimination in its own ranks, and less time trying to ban offensive words protected by the First Amendment, and less time suing the Salvation Army for requiring employees to speak English (a lawsuit far more harmful than the EEOC’s silly lawsuit against Hooters).

The EEOC seems hypocritical, but perhaps no more so than a President who harps endlessly on “responsibility” while proposing a budget that would increase projected deficits by $4.8 trillion to $9.3 trillion, flouting his repeated campaign promise to implement a “net spending cut” if elected (plus a pork-filled $800 billion stimulus package that will shrink the economy).

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