President Obama hailed the enactment of his $787 billion economic stimulus plan in his weekly address, saying that the measure would create 3.5 million jobs and serve as the "quickest and broadest tax cut in history." Rep. Dave Camp, the Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee, delivered the Republican response, attacking the measure as an expensive and ineffective spending bill.

Even as the President hailed what he called "the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history," he continued to warn that it "only a first step on the road to economic recovery."

"No single piece of this broad economic recovery can, by itself, meet the demands that have been placed on us. We can't help people find work or pay their bills unless we unlock credit for families and businesses. We can't solve our housing crisis unless we help people find work so that they can make payments on their homes. We can't produce shared prosperity without firm rules of the road, and we can't generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control. In short, we cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing them all. And that is exactly what the strategy we are pursuing is designed to do."

According to the President, the new tax cuts will cause most paychecks to rise by about $65 per month starting in April.

While explaining that “Republicans genuinely want to work with the President," Rep. Camp criticized the Democratic leadership in Congress for their "lousy" spending priorities and for writing the bill without sufficient Republican input.

The President will turn his attention on Monday to the upcoming release of his preliminary budget by convening a fiscal responsibility summit. Though the stimulus measure passed Congress without a single Republican vote in the House and only three Republican votes in the Senate, Rep. Camp described the budget summit as an "opportunity to hit reset" to "work in a transparent and bipartisan way to address our nations’ problems."