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Schumer, other Dems look to revise stimulus package

BY TOM BRUNE | tom.brune@newsday.com

January 8, 2009

WASHINGTON - As Congress prepares to take up President-elect Barack Obama's stimulus package, key Democrats, including Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), are planning to revise it to add projects and approaches to spending that they favor as the best way to help the country emerge from the economic recession.

Obama is scheduled to deliver an address at George Mason University in Virginia today to discuss the economy and to urge Congress to quickly pass his still-evolving economic plan worth about $775 billion over two years.

As he has discussed his plan, which he has not yet released, Obama has insisted that lawmakers refrain from adding earmarks diverting funds to local projects to the final stimulus legislation.

But Congress may not act as quickly, or as smoothly, as Obama would like.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday she doesn't expect the plan to be enacted until mid-February, after it is considered in the House and Senate. And lawmakers are making clear they want to be involved in shaping its final form.

Schumer and other Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee, for instance, met behind closed doors yesterday and later said they saw ways to improve the package.

"The committee clearly wants to have its stamp on stimulus," the chairman, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), told reporters after the meeting.

Baucus added he intended to hold a meeting of the committee's full membership today to discuss proposals for the stimulus legislation.

"There is a general agreement in the broad brush of what President-elect Obama has proposed and there are lots of interesting discussions to change certain parts and make it better," Schumer told reporters after the meeting.

One change Schumer is advocating in the Senate Finance Committee is a hike in the amount of college tuition that individuals and families can deduct on their federal taxes, an item he mentioned at a news conference of the Senate Democratic leadership yesterday.

"We have already passed a bill that allows a certain amount of tuition to be deducted," Schumer said. "We're going to increase that deduction significantly, up to $3,000 per student, $9,000 a year per families. And we are going to include things like textbooks, which can often cost $1,000."

Households can now deduct $4,000 in tuition, a Schumer aide said.

Schumer last month also announced he would push for the stimulus package to include $20 billion for public transportation. Right now, there are indications that Obama's plan includes transportation money only for roads and highways.