On the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s $787 billion federal stimulus package, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, a Republican candidate for governor, issued a statement criticizing the effort.
“The good news jobs are not going to come from top-down Washington ideas but from bottom-up Tennessee ideas, small businesses and utilizing the state’s regional assets in economic revitalization,” he said.
Mr. Haslam said the stimulus was “papering over real problems with Tennessee taxpayer dollars.”
A news release from the White House argued that the stimulus created or preserved 2.4 million jobs, but Mr. Haslam said the unemployment rate has “skyrocketed.”
congressional hopefuls sound off