Washington, DC - Senate Finance Committee provisions giving tax rebate checks to 20 million American seniors and 250,000 disabled veterans have been approved by the House of Representatives tonight, and are expected to be signed into law quickly by the President as part of an economic stimulus bill. Last week, Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) presented and the panel passed a package of provisions to improve on a House-proposed economic plan by allowing seniors living solely on Social Security and veterans living on non-taxable disability benefits to receive stimulus checks just like millions of other Americans.
“I kept saying that the Senate could improve on the House package and get it all done before Feb. 15, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Thanks to some persistence in the Senate and the good sense of the House tonight, the President now gets to sign a better economic stimulus bill into law," Baucus said. “There were many, many calls to simply accept the original economic stimulus agreement and pass it without changes. But I had more than 20 million good reasons to stick to my guns on improving it. The 20 million seniors and 250,000 disabled veterans we added to this economic stimulus plan are part of the American family, and they will contribute these funds to the American economy. Adding these folks to the economic stimulus plan was the morally right thing to do and the fiscally right thing to do. I’ll be proud to see the President sign this into law."
The Finance plan also included safeguards missing from the House bill to ensure that illegal immigrants could not receive rebates, which the House approved tonight as well.
The Senate voted 81-16 today to accept the bipartisan Finance Committee provisions and to send the measure back to the House for final approval.
A summary of today’s amendment is available on the Finance Committee website at http://www.finance.senate.gov/
Source: Ranking Member’s News
