Bush: Economic stimulus package to be "robust"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush insisted on Wednesday that the economic stimulus package he is working on with Congress will be robust enough to help the U.S. economy.
"I talked to them about my desire to work with the Congress to get a stimulus package passed, one that's going to be robust enough to affect the economy, simple enough for people to understand it and efficient enough to have an impact," Bush told reporters after a White House meeting with a group of city mayors.
"I'm confident that we can get something done," he added. "There's a spirit that says we need to take a fundamentally sound economy and help it ... deal with the uncertainty with a pro-growth package."
Bush was speaking a day after he and leaders of the Democratic-led Congress vowed to move quickly to work out the details of a $150 billion stimulus package for the U.S. economy. Recession fears have roiled world financial markets.
A rout of global stock markets at the start of the week sent the Federal Reserve scrambling to slash U.S. interest rates on Tuesday by three quarters of a point, the largest cut in more than 23 years.
(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama,)
