The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

Heritage’s Bill Beach testified at yesterday’s Economic Recovery Working Group hearing on Capitol Hill about an alternative to the misguided Keynesian stimulus package liberals in Congress are advocating. The hearing came a week after President-elect Barack Obama invited alternative suggestions for promoting economic growth.

Obama’s openness to alternatives prompted Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) to do something a bit unusual: open the hearing to American citizens, four of whom submitted questions via YouTube for the witnesses.

Two of those witnesses were former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, both of whom seemed to enjoy the citizen engagement as much as talking to lawmakers. On the second panel, Beach, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute tackled two more citizens questions.

One of the four questions came from Eric Odom, who donned a Chicago Bears cap to talk about tax relief. We wanted to call it your attention because of his preferred alternative — a plan that’s based on the tax cuts outlined by Beach and J.D. Foster.