Morning News
On new lending to help small businesses:
From the Boston Globe:
The president yesterday detailed a plan to help expand lending to small businesses through tax cuts and assistance to community banks. Under the program, $30 billion in returned cash for the Troubled Asset Relief Program would be made available to help smaller banks lend to local businesses.
“We’re going to start where most new jobs do - with small businesses,’’ he said. “These are the companies that begin in basements and garages when an entrepreneur takes a chance on his dream or a worker decides it’s time she became her own boss.’’
From Market Watch:
Taking his job creation pitch on the road a day after submitting his latest budget to Congress, President Barack Obama on Tuesday rolled out a new lending fund for small businesses and emphasized his plans for cutting the record U.S. budget deficit.
Obama used a town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. to highlight the fund, which would take $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program and encourage banks with less than $10 billion in assets to lend to small businesses.
The plan, which would need to be approved by Congress, is already drawing fire from Republicans but Obama said on Tuesday it'll help lift the economy from the recession.
"Small businesses...have created roughly 65% of all new jobs over the past decade and a half," Obama said.
On “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
From the Wall Street Journal:
Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation's top uniformed officer, made a strong appeal for allowing gays to serve openly in the military, a shift that highlighted the Pentagon's growing support for lifting the "don't ask, don't tell" law. Adm. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee he believed the "don't ask" restrictions—which require gay troops to keep their sexual orientation a secret—could be eliminated without harming military morale, recruitment or readiness. With the comments, Adm. Mullen became the highest-ranking military officer to ever endorse repealing the restrictions, a source of controversy within the Pentagon since they were put in place by the Clinton administration in 1993.