As he travels around Missouri, U.S. Sen. Kit Bond is hearing a similar message from small business owners in regard to President Barack Obama’s proposed budget.
“Most of them are scared to death,” said Bond, during a visit to Hannibal Monday afternoon where he met with local community and business leaders to gather feedback. “Small businesses flourish, grow and create jobs when they believe there is a good economic forecast for them. They’re saying, ‘We’re the ones who created 8 million jobs between 2003 and 2008. We did that because they had a favorable economic climate.’ Many people have told me that the small businesses are wondering whether it’s going to make sense to continue to risk their money and put their time and effort in creating jobs if the outlook is very gloomy for our businesses.”
There is little to like about the proposed budget, according to Bond.
“I’m very much concerned about the budget that President Obama has presented. It spends too much, it taxes too much and it borrows too much,” he said. “The budget predicts doubling our national debt in five years and tripling it in 10 which means not only an impact on our economy now, but our children and grandchildren will have a heavy load of debt on their backs that I don’t think the country can afford.”
Of particular concern to Missouri’s senior senator is a proposed cap-and-trade bill, which he called a “cap-and-tax bill.”
“I think everybody ought to be concerned about the cap-and-tax bill,” said Bond. “We defeated one last year that would have cost $6.7 trillion dollars. That’s going to be a tax on everybody’s electric bill. It’s going to be a tax on gasoline. It’s going to be a tax on everything that we buy that is produced by fossil fuel. Missouri depends on coal for 80 percent of its electric generation. If that goes through families, senior citizens like me are going to be paying much higher utility bills and jobs are going to be leaving the state. Small businesses, if they are not able to create jobs are going to leave a big hole in lots of communities and in their economy.”
Bond acknowledged he will be seeking assistance from across the aisle.
“I was very successful on one amendment saying that the very expensive cap and trade, or cap and tax, should not pass the Senate without 60 votes. I got 14 Democrats to vote with me on that one,” he said. “I hope we can get more Democrats who will come over and vote for this and bring some sense to this budget plan.”
The senator, who is in his final term, agreed that there are subtle signs that the economy may be turning around.
“The stock market, which is usually a forecaster, thinks that now they’ve gotten on to what I think is a real problem in the economy and that is dealing with the toxic assets ... the bad debt,” he said. “If they’ll take that out of the system then they can start flowing credit again.”
