Mac-Coleman

9 September 2011 –

Alas, President Obama’s speech before a joint session of Congress wasn’t worth missing the NFL season opener’s pregame show. In fact, if forced to watch one or the other, I would have opted for the pregame hype instead of the prejobs hype—and I don’t watch football!

Let’s see what I gleaned from the speech:

1) A jobs program that is focused on construction jobs—read unions in non right-to-work states—and teachers—read teachers’ unions. $447,000,000,000 of borrowed money to pay off his political base.

2) The proposal is not accompanied by an actual bill. In other words, there are no other words. There is only whining and cajoling and needling by a weakened president. The House doesn’t have to do anything today to counter the President’s jobs jab, because there is no bill upon which to act. The President set himself up to lose again.

3) The tax benefits mentioned in the speech concentrated on tax credits and the extension of temporary payroll tax cuts. These are terms for temporary loopholes to favor certain parts of society until after the 2012 elections. The benefit to a business is based on manipulation of an increasingly complex tax code and not on market principles. Jobs will still last only as long as the tax credit provides revenue, not as long as the revenue stream created by a good idea in the market. The government never creates legitimate private sector jobs; it only spends money appeasing people. This is particularly true for the President who opposes true tax reform, e.g., elimination of targeted deductions for all, in favor of those for groups whose votes he seeks and the elimination of such deductions for the so-called rich as a political bludgeon for those voters who oppose him. This bill is nothing more than more of nothing.

4) The President wants the Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, created to tackle the government’s overspending and deficit problems because Congress en masse can’t seem to do it, to figure out how to pay yet another $447,000,000,000 unfunded mandate. Let’s see, the last $800,000,000,000 the President spent to stimulate and “jolt” the economy back to prosperity disappeared into the gaping yaw of the deficit with little benefit to show for it. So, let’s double down and risk even more money on the fool’s bet? Not if I were writing the checks.

5) $447,000,000,000 is an unbelievably large amount of money. It can give 1,986,666 people—the number of people in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, $75,000 a year for three years to stay home and wait for the checks in the mail. Can the President’s program guarantee at least that many jobs for three years? If not, it really sounds like waste to me. In fact, it sounds like a waste of tax money—borrowed money—that he drove to the Capitol Building with government purchased gasoline to give the speech in the first place.

6) This plea—you cannot call it a proposal or a bill because the President hasn’t written any of it down—is dead on arrival on the Hill. The words floated away, unloved, unrequited, unreal. The speech seems to be designed to prepare the hustings for the President’s run in the 2012 elections. He now will declare Congress’s refusal to respond as proof that an obstructive Congress is ruining the country.

A Muse: If the President cannot think of anything that doesn’t include spending a lot of other peoples’ money, I have a proposal for him (Sorry, I didn’t write it in the form of a bill either). He can take $447,000,000,000 and offer it to small businesses in the form of tax and interest free loans and grants. The stipulation is that the money must be used to expand the company’s production and employee base. Any jobs created must be viable for five years, and they must be created in the United States. The expansion cannot be in the fields of alternative energy, green businesses, or fighting global warming. Expansion in the field of education—specifically in home and private schooling initiatives—will be first in line for grants. I am sure that the number of jobs created with this type of program would better approach the 1,986,666 level I stated above than would his proposal. But, if the President were the kind of politician who would accept my proposal, he wouldn’t be in the trouble he is in right now.

The speech hurt the President far more than it helped him. It was the last slippery step on a foolishly conceived path to recover from previous failures. Ouch!