The following is a short summary of the combined House and Senate Stimulus Bills. Shockingly, the only item included to help the housing industry is a provision to remove the repayment requirement of the current $7500 tax credit for first time home buyers.

Tax Relief for American Families

• Provides immediate and sustained tax relief to 95 percent of American workers through the Making Work Pay Tax Cut, a refundable tax credit of up to $400 per worker ($800 per couple filing jointly), phasing out completely at $200,000 for couples filing jointly and $100,000 for single filers. o Helps first-time homebuyers and strengthens the housing market by enhancing the current credit for first-time home purchases with the removal of the repayment requirement.
• Cuts taxes for the families of millions of children through an expansion of the child tax credit (allowing families to begin qualifying for the child tax credit with every dollar earned over $3,000).
• Temporarily suspends the taxation of some unemployment benefits.
• Expands the Earned Income Tax Credit by providing tax relief to families with three or more children and increasing marriage penalty relief.
• Helps more than 4 million additional students attend college with a new, partially refundable $2,500 tax credit for families.
• Protects 26 million middle-class families from being hit by the AMT.
• Provides incentives to buy new cars, including light trucks and SUVs, with a tax deduction for State and local sales taxes paid on the purchase.

Business Tax Incentives to Create Jobs and Spur Investment

• Helps businesses quickly recover costs of new capital investments by extending the bonus depreciation and increased small business expensing for businesses making investments in plants and equipment in 2009.
• Includes a variety of provisions to help small business, including small business expensing for investment in new plants and equipment, loss carry back for small businesses, a delay of the 3% withholding tax on payments to businesses that sell goods or services to governments, and a cut in the capital gains tax cut for investors in small businesses who hold stock for more than five years.
• Provides assistance to companies looking to reduce their debt burdens by delaying the tax on businesses that have discharged indebtedness, which will help these companies strengthen their balance sheets and obtain resources to invest in job creation.
• Provides incentives to create new jobs with tax credits for hiring recently discharged unemployed veterans and youth that have been out of work and out of school for the 6 months prior to hire.

Extending and Improving Unemployment Benefits

• Continues through December 2009 the extended unemployment benefits program (which provides up to 33 weeks of extended benefits) that is otherwise scheduled to begin to phase out at the end of March 2009 – thereby helping an additional 3.5 million jobless workers.
• Increases unemployment benefits for 20 million jobless workers by $25 per week, and encourages states to modernize their UI systems to keep up with the changing workforce with expanded coverage.
• Temporarily suspends the taxation of some unemployment benefits.
• Every dollar in unemployment benefits creates at least $1.63 in economic activity, according to chief economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com

Increasing Food Stamp Benefits

• Increases food stamp benefits by over 13% to help offset rising food costs for more than 31 million Americans, half of whom are children.
• Every dollar of food stamps creates at least $1.73 in economic activity, according to chief economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com.

Increasing Other Food Assistance
Provides other food assistance, including $100 million for Emergency Food and Shelter to help local community organizations provide food and shelter; $100 million for formula grants to states for elderly nutrition services including Meals on Wheels; and $150 million for the Emergency Food Assistance Program to purchase commodities for food banks to refill emptying shelves.

Helping Workers Find Jobs
Provides funding to help workers find jobs, including $4 billion for job training including formula grants for adult job training, dislocated worker job training, and youth services (including funding for summer jobs for young people); $500 million for Vocational Rehabilitation State Grants to help persons with disabilities prepare for gainful employment; $500 million to match unemployed individuals to job openings through state employment agencies; and $120 million to provide community service jobs to an additional 24,000 low-income older Americans.

Expanding Housing Assistance
Increases support for several critical housing programs, including providing $2 billion for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program to help communities purchase and rehabilitate foreclosed, vacant properties and $1.5 billion for the Emergency Shelter Grant program to provide short-term rental assistance and other aid for families during the economic crisis.

Providing Aid to Seniors, Disabled Veterans, and SSI Recipients
Provides a payment of $250 to Social Security beneficiaries, SSI recipients, and veterans receiving disability compensation and pension benefits from the VA.

Extending TAA
Extends Trade Adjustment Assistance benefits for at least 160,000 new workers over the next two years who lose their jobs because of increased imports or factory shifts to certain foreign countries.

Healthcare

Modernizing Health Care System to Lower Costs and Save Lives

• Provides $19 billion to accelerate adoption of Health Information Technology (HIT) systems by doctors and hospitals, in order to modernize the health care system, save billions of dollars, reduce medical errors and improve quality.
• Strengthens Federal privacy and security law to protect personally identifiable health information from misuse and abuse.
• Creates hundreds of thousands of jobs – many in high-tech sectors – by promoting the adoption of HIT.
• CBO estimates that this proposal will generate billions of dollars in “system-wide” savings.

Protecting Health Care Coverage for Millions through Medicaid

• Protects health care coverage for millions of Americans during this recession, by providing an estimated $87 billion over the next two years in additional federal matching funds to help states maintain their Medicaid programs in the face of massive state budget shortfalls.
• Helps states avoid cutting eligibility for Medicaid and scaling back the health care services covered.

Providing Health Insurance for Unemployed Workers
Currently, laid-off workers, under the COBRA program, can buy into their former employer’s health insurance. But the premiums are often prohibitively expensive. In order to help people maintain their health coverage, the bill provides a 60% subsidy for COBRA premiums for up to 9 months.

Investing in Prevention & Comparative Effectiveness Research

• Provides $1 billion for a new Prevention and Wellness Fund. Studies have shown that investing in prevention can lower overall health care costs by billions of dollars.
• Provides $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research, to help patients and doctors determine the effectiveness of different treatments. This research will improve the quality of care.

Education

Preventing Teacher Layoffs and Education Cuts by the States
Prevents teacher layoffs and other cutbacks in education and other key services, by establishing a $53.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, including $40.6 billion to local school districts using existing funding formulas, which can be used for preventing cutbacks, preventing layoffs, school modernization, or other purposes; $5 billion to states as bonus grants for meeting key performance measures in education; and $8 billion to states for other high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education.

Making College More Affordable

• Increases the higher education tax credit to a maximum of $2,500. Also makes it available to nearly 4 million low-income students who had not had any access to the higher education tax credit in the past – by making it partially refundable.
• Increases the maximum Pell Grant by $500, for a maximum of $5,350 in 2009 and $5,550 in 2010.
• Adds $200 million to the vital College Work-Study program.

Investing in Early Childhood Development

• Provides $1.1 billion for Early Head Start and $1 billion for Head Start, which provide comprehensive development services to low-income infants and preschool children – thereby providing services for 110,000 additional infants and children.
• Provides $2 billion for the Child Care Development Block Grant to provide child care services to an additional 300,000 children in low-income families while their parents go to work.

Providing Other Key Education Investments

• Provides $13 billion for Title I grants to help disadvantaged kids reach high academic standards – ensuring that in this period of tight state and local budgets these vital services are maintained.
• Provides $12.2 billion for grants for IDEA (Special Education) to increase the federal share of these costs, and prevent these mandatory costs from forcing states to cut other areas of education.

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