* In 2009 Waxman, convinced that the federal government could best stimulate America’s ailing economy by means of massive spending initiatives, supported President Barack Obama‘s $789 billion economic-stimulus plan — whose actual cost was estimated at $3.27 trillion by the Heritage Foundation. When asked why he believed that such spending levels would produce more desirable results than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federal spending programs had produced in the 1930s, Waxman said that Roosevelt had “failed … to spend as much money as was needed to get people back to work and get the economy moving again.”
* Waxman favors the implementation of legislation which, like the so-called Fairness Doctrine that was repealed by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987, would require broadcasters to provide equal air time to advocates of conflicting views on controversial issues and would likely have the effect of diminishing the influence of conservative talk radio.