Foster explains unpopular votes at session with business owners

Congressman Bill Foster took Geneva Chamber of Commerce members through a primer on the state of the economy Thursday morning and, in doing so, revealed further insight into why he cast some of the votes he knows some of the Republicans in his district have concerns about.

Foster spent much of 90-minute session explaining what led him to support the bailouts for banks, the federal stimulus and health care reform, all votes expected to cost him support from some of the more fiscally conservative members of the 14th Congressional District.

Foster said he supported all of the measures after becoming convinced the system behind them was broken or in danger of far worse collapse.

Foster said he supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, to address the subprime mortgage crisis because all of President Obama's advisers believed there was at least a 50 percent chance of the country slipping into another Great Depression without it.

"It was essential," Foster said. "I believe it was an emergency. And I believe that where we would've been had we not passed the stimulus, passed the TARP, and allowed the Fed this massive intervention in our economy, we would've been in a lot worse shape."

Foster said there was a part of him that wanted to let the troubled financial institutions collapse. However, local constituents convinced him that couldn't be allowed to happen.

"We were on the phone to banks and businesses in the area here saying, 'Look, is this Wall Street making noise? Can we just let these sons of guns collapse?' And they said, 'Nope, we can't. This is a run on every bank in the country. We're being told that all of our normal money exchange with the main Wall Street banks is being frozen. If this persists, within two weeks we're going to be pulling back all of the operating lines of credit from every business in your district as we start to pull in money to save ourselves.'

"As a small-business owner, I know if you get your line of credit pulled back, it's death. This wasn't just a Wall Street crisis."

Foster said his vote on health care reform was more of a crisis of conscience after hearing from constituents who were losing everything after being denied insurance coverage because they had cancer, or even menopause, as a pre-existing condition.

Foster said the best, short explanation he's heard of why health care reform is needed came from actor Ben Stein, who is a former speech writer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

"He said, 'This is pretty simple really. The problem is that people don't have health care. They don't have money for health care. And they're dying. So you've got to find some money and give it to them so they can buy health care so they don't die. And to find that money, you're going to have to get it from people like me, Ben Stein, and that's OK with me because you can't have people dying.'

"And he cut to the heart of the matter," Foster added. "You're either going to do that, or you're not."

Foster said he understands, and shares, the concerns people have about how much health care reform and the economic bailouts will cost. He even said he's pessimistic Congress will take the tough votes to pay down the debt as soon as possible. But he pledged to cast the votes necessary to urge his Washington, D.C. colleagues to come up with a real plan.

Foster said the best idea he's heard so far is to create a debt commission, similar to what Congress did after World War II, to root out unnecessary spending.

"I voted against the Democratic budget every single time it's come up," Foster said. "The budget is two different things. It is this year's budget plan, and it is a 10-year plan that should show how we're going to pay off this debt, and it's not. It's a plan to accumulate the debt more slowly. That is, quite frankly, not enough.

"We're going to have to do very, very painful things. It is better to have that pain now than 20 years from now. The amount of debt that we're piling up, to me, is pretty scary.

"We have to not only pay down our debt, but build up a rainy-day fund. That's going to be very, very tough."