Yesterday the Republicans once again failed to put Americans ahead of their misguided loyalty to Republican unity (whatever that means!). And for the life of me, I cannot imagine how anyone can say the Democrats have failed again to stand up to this President. When it takes a 2/3 majority to override a veto and you only have a bare majority, failure is not the fault of the Democratic Party.

In this interview John Barrow gives his perspective on why the SCHIP funding is needed. You might want to compare his interview with the one a few weeks ago with Nathan Deal (Republican GA 9th).

My problem is I do not trust the Republicans to tell me the truth about this. For example, Deal and the Republicans generally talk about this bill as “expanding” coverage and being socialized medicine. Well, it’s the same damn program we have had for 10 years and no one tried to repeal it because it was socialized medicine. We apparently have had socialized medicine for 10 years without complaint.

According to Barrow, the bill that was vetoed by Bush actually tried to correct some of the excesses that had occurred. Those excesses are providing coverage to adults, providing coverage to families with incomes in excess of 400% of the poverty level. Well, what I did not know until this interview is that all of those deviations from the original guidelines are approved and authorized by the President. Thus, when the Republicans complain about coverage being afforded to adults in New Jersey, Bush approved it. Whatever variance there is, Bush apparently approved it.

How is it expanding anything when there are hundreds of thousands of children who qualify for SCHIP but there simply are not enough funds available? The additional $35 billion over 5 years is intended to simply include more children on essentially the same basis as before. As Nancy Pelosi pointed out, 40 days of funding for the fiasco in Iraq would pay for this program. If we can’t afford SCHIP funding, we certainly can’t afford the War.

The HOPE Tax Credit has nothing to do with the HOPE Scholarship. The tax credit allows a dollar for dollar tax credit (write off) of the cost of college tuition and certain expenses. Originally, the maximum credit was $1,500 per year for a maximum of two years, but apparently it has increased over the years to $1,650 in 2006. That adds up to a tax credit totaling $3,000. John has introduced a bill to increase this tax credit to $3,000 per year for 4 years which would allow a total credit of $12,000, an increase of $9,000.

The average student loan for a college graduate is about $16,000. With the benefit of a $12,000 tax credit, the ulitmate burden of the loan is lessened substantially. The idea behind the increase in the credit is to give people a break if they are willing to invest in their education and thus the future of America. Sounds like a good idea to me.