Kevin talked stimulus on Friday with a link to our January 6th recommendations letter. Another letter went up after that post (download the PDF) stressing temporary tax relief for companies that purchase their own debt.

As Congress considers a stimulus package to jumpstart the economy, we encourage you to adopt provisions that will immediately provide businesses with the resources to grow and hire more employees, and at a minimum avoid unnecessary layoffs. In particular, we urge you to support a proposal for temporary tax relief for companies that purchase their own or related party debt at a discount. Under current law, if a company or related party purchases its own debt at a discount, the company is required to pay income tax on the difference between the purchase price and the original issuance price of the debt. Temporary suspension of this tax will create and preserve jobs, facilitate the “deleveraging” of the U.S. economy and strengthen financial institutions’ balance sheets.

As Bruce Josten noted in this video clip our economy "basically operates on two bookends, one is credit, one is confidence and we don't have a lot of either right now, restoring credit and confidence is critical." I know Kevin posted it, but here is the clip again.