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FAYETTEVILLE -- The fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" coalition of Congressmen is ready to support president-elect Barack Obama's deficit-financed stimulus package because of the deep national economic crisis, coalition member 4th District Rep. Mike Ross, D-Prescott., told the Political Animals Club of Northwest Arkansas on Thursday.

"I'm still a stickler for pay-go -- pay as you go -- for new mandated spending for ongoing government programs, but this stimulus package is an emergency," Ross said in an interview after speaking to the breakfast meeting at the Fayetteville Clarion Hotel. This is "one time spending to jump start the economy in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression." "Blue Dogs" are a coalition of 51 congressional Democrats who favor a balanced federal budget.

Obama's plan will build roads and other infrastructure that will provide jobs in the short term and avenues for growth in the long term, Ross said. "The last stimulus package borrowed money from China," he told the audience of about 120 people. "People used it to either pay down credit card debt, which was good but didn't stimulate the economy, or to buy more goods made in China. Whose economy did that stimulate?"

U.S. road needs are well known, Ross said: "I have $5 billion in road needs in my district. That's not the wish list. A wish list would amount to $10 billion. The last transportation bill we passed for highways was a five-year program that included $6 billion in new highway construction in the entire U.S."

Interstate 49, a plan to build a freeway from Canada to Houston and beyond that would pass through west Arkansas, first was proposed "when I was in kindergarten," Ross said. Interstate 69 through east and south Arkansas was first proposed "five years before I was born," he said. "The only parts that have been completed are a section in Kentucky and the portion between Memphis and the casinos" in nearby Tunica, Miss., he said.

Ross said the media often miscast the district as a "southern Arkansas district," Ross protested to the group. People in his district just south of Fort Smith or in Paris wouldn't consider themselves part of southern Arkansas, he said.