Education Jobs and Medical Assistance Act

I tuned in to CSPAN yesterday to watch the debate on the House floor regarding the Education, Jobs, and Medicaid Assistance Act. Much to the dismay of several House Republicans, Speaker Pelosi summoned everyone back from their summer recess to vote on the measure which passed the Senate last week. The Education, Jobs, and Medicaid Assistance Act provides $26 billion in funds to states who are struggling to keep their teachers employed. Also written into the bill was the closure of a tax loophole for American companies that ship jobs oversees. By closing this loophole, the majority hopes to be able to pay for this bill. But, as Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pointed out, this bill pays for 6 months of Medicaid over the course of 10 years of tax increases. Now, as an English major and not an Economist, I cannot tell you if this is true or not. However, I can tell you that this debate on the floor started as every other debate on the House floor. The democrats stand up and blame the republicans for everything that is wrong with the world, and more specifically that they refuse to invest in education. Then the republicans fire back by calling this a “teacher bailout”, as if by attaching the word “bailout” to anything, they can automatically make it sound like a bad idea and just another of those terrible “entitlement” programs that we can’t afford right now because our military is underfunded. I was actually shocked at the amount of time the congressmen and women from both parties didn't spend talking about teachers, or even strategies states can adopt to prevent teacher lay-offs other than just throwing money at them.

However, by the end of the day the bill was signed into law by President Obama, and according to the White House’s website, there are 2,000 teacher jobs in Mississippi that are going to be saved.