With bad economic news coming at us every day, it’s hard to swallow that we’ve spent more than $40 billion to rebuild Iraq. It’s even harder to swallow that the Iraqi government is enjoying a $50 billion surplus.

People across our country are suffering the consequences of President Bush’s and John Kline’s failed policies. Their unrestrained spending on Iraq is not the source of all our economic pain, but it’s undeniable that $40 billion has strained us greatly and could have gone a long way to addressing many issues our nation faces.

It’s time to refocus on making America’s economy thrive. That means making smart decisions today – even though some of them will be hard – for our own benefit and for that of our children and grandchildren. This isn’t about one-time economic stimulus checks; this must be about a long-term vision for economically sensible tax policies, changes to our health care system that alleviate the excessive burden on American families and business, and investment in infrastructure, education and alternative energy. And, it must be about stopping the bleeding of our tax dollars into Iraq.

Imagine an American tax dollar. It can be put into Iraq’s economy or our own. It can be given as a tax break to someone in the top one percent of income-earners – those who, in Minnesota, make $350,000 or more per year – or to the rest of us, whose expenditures put the most fuel in our country’s economic engine. It can be spent continuing to give tax incentives to oil companies making record profits while we pay record gas prices, or it can be spent exploring energy alternatives in preparation for the day when oil is no longer a viable source of fuel for us.

In Iraq, the United States has refurbished 20 hospitals and built 80 new clinics. For the equivalent of 29 days of spending there, we could fully fund the State Children’s Health Care Program (SCHIP), a popular and successful program that has helped keep millions of kids healthy so they can spend their days in school. President Bush and Rep. Kline have opposed the expansion of SCHIP – Rep. Kline voted against it five times in just one year.

While we have paid for the rehabilitation of more than 6,000 Iraqi schools and the retraining of 60,000 Iraqi teachers, here at home, President Bush and his allies want to cut $100 million from programs that improve teacher training – while class sizes balloon and our schools get labeled as “failing.”

In Iraq, American tax dollars have built five airports and 96 rail stations; here at home, the federal government should be taking responsibility for its role in rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges and investing in public transportation options that get people where they need to go. But they’re not – and Rep. Kline is one of the leaders of the movement not to.

Further, while the American people and American businesses work hard and pay taxes to fund development in Iraq, a government contractor – KBR, formerly part of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton – avoids paying its fair share of Social Security and Medicare taxes by creating shell companies in the Cayman Islands. We need to stop rewarding companies that squirm out of paying taxes with contracts that enrich them with American tax dollars.

Some members of Congress have offered practical goals to guide us in addressing issues that impact our economy – as well as those that will impact it if we don’t think ahead. Here’s what I support:

• Beginning the process of leaving Iraq.
• Lowering health care costs and increasing quality by spreading costs, cutting the middle man and focusing on prevention. This is especially important for small businesses, where most new jobs are created. The amount of money small companies spend each year to keep up with employee health care costs is prohibitive to growing their businesses
• Making sure our energy grid can keep up with demand. (Remember “brown outs”?)
• Lowering energy prices and creating hundreds of thousands of “green” jobs by providing incentives for clean, renewable energy.
• Fighting price-gouging at the gas pump.
• Helping Americans navigate the credit crisis. We need to address both the personal and business ramifications of the boom-and-bust cycle we’re in and want to avoid in the future. It’s important for economic and family stability that as many people as possible keep their homes. We need to provide incentives for lenders to work with owners facing foreclosure to ensure this happens – something that is in lenders’ interest long-term, also. It’s equally important we institute and enforce appropriate but not reactionary regulations to prevent future irresponsible lending.
• Making college more affordable and K-12 classrooms more successful.
• Rebuilding and modernizing our nation’s roads and bridges.
• Instituting tax policies that make economic sense, including the Fair Share Act of 2008, which will end the practice of U.S. government contractors setting up sham companies in foreign jurisdictions to avoid taxes.
• Reducing the deficit and restoring fiscal responsibility to ensure our nation is prepared to meet future challenges.
• Moving towards more balanced trade relations, particularly with countries that own large shares of our debt, such as China and South Korea. It’s hard to have an effective trade policy when countries to which we owe vast amounts of money also have the inside track on trade.
• Investing in our internet “superhighway” so we keep up with the bandwidth currently available in other countries, such as South Korea and Japan.
  

It’s time to change our country’s economic course. Our elected officials are called on to work for our nation’s well-being. The mismanaged war in Iraq and other short-sighted policies have stood in the way for too long. We must ensure America continues to be a place where people who work hard can achieve their dreams.