The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Law Essay

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
The legislation I will focus on is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009- from herein- referred to as the Act and/or ARRA that was passed into law on Feb 17, 2009, by the then-president Barack Obama. The Act was formulated as a way to address the 2008/2009 recession that threatened to sink the country into an economic depression. According to Klein and Staal (2017), the main reason for the adoption of the Act was the preservation and creation of jobs and the stabilization of state governments through affordable service delivery as ways to induce an economic recovery. The Act focused on various ways to improve the rate of employment and local production including increasing local and state government funding, supporting the economically challenged, offering temporary tax relief to growing businesses (CBO, 2015). Some of the ministries and service departments addresses in the Act include education, health, energy, agriculture, security, environment, transport, and finance.
The Act’s Path to Becoming a Law
The Act was introduced to the house on January 26th, 2009 for amendments and jurisdiction decisions and later transferred to the Senate on 29th for review and approval. It was then returned to the House on 10th February 2009 to resolve the differences in the senator recommendations and the house review was tabled on the 13th. The Senate agreed to the changes and the bill was presented to the president on 16th and signed into law on the 17th of February, 2009.
After its introduction on 26th, the bill was passed through the Committees and Appropriations and Budgets and Houses for considerations for debate in the House. The Committee considered the bill and was approved as the original Bill for further amendments on the 28th of January. Some of the amendments proposed by the House on 28th to H.R.1. include H. Amdts.12-15 touching on energy, transport, and state funding (CRS, 2009). Before handing to the senate on 29th the House proposed ten amendments to the bill approving seven spread among energy, transport, and funding (CRS, 2009).
The bill from the House was received and read in the Senate on 29th January and was tabled on 2nd February 2009. According to the Congressional Research Service (2009), the senate made several amendments to the House Bill labeled from S. Amdt.98-570. Some of the senate proposals on the bill touch on infrastructure investments, revenue, Biomedical research, support for small businesses, department of defense funding, and social security benefits (CRS, 2009). The senate also reviewed the bill's proposals on education funding, veteran welfare, and displaced people. House received the senate amendments on 10th Feb, tabled on 13th, and presented to the president on 16th and became law after President Barack Obama signed it on 17th February 2009.
Goals of the Legislation
The timing of AARA of 2009 was meant to act as an economic revival program of the government to provide and preserve jobs through increased state government expenditure through a fiscal stimulus with an almost $800 billion budget (Klein and Staal, 2017). The goal of the Act was to make supplemental appropriations in selected sectors of the economy as a way to increase self-sufficiency to ministries, local and state governments (CRC, 2009). The Act was aimed at injecting money into the US economy with targeted sectors like infrastructure, social benefits- especially for challenged groups-, science and health technological investments, and subnational governments as a way to increase jobs and help with economic revitalization (Carley, 2016; Crucini and Vu, 2017). Each of the aspects targeted by AARA had different levels of support from legislators and economists depending on the projected impacts of its legislation.
* Local and State Government Aid Funding
The Act’s main goal in increasing local and State Governments was through some initiatives like raising the Medicaid charges, education federal aids, support to commute projects and road constructions, revolving & relief funds, and tax credits (CBO, 2015). The funding’s main role was to stabilize state governments weakened by the depression as well as balance the taxes that were above the generated revenues thus straining the service delivery (Klein and Staal, 2017). These inductions helped in maintaining the services offered especially in medicine to maintain the workforce and social care. The goal behind the surge in local government by federal injections is to increase the financial resources which would result in more output (Carley, 2016).
Some of the proponents of the formula used to fund state governments argued that the Act did not spe...