Many members of Congress are back in their districts for August recess, but the House and Senate will remain in pro forma sessions throughout the recess to prevent President Obama from making recess appointments. The Senate will convene for pro forma sessions on August 5th, 9th, 12th, 16th, 19th, 23rd, 26th, 30th, and September 2nd. The Senate and House will reconvene for legislative business on Tuesday, September 6th.
As reported yesterday, the Senate voted 74-26 to concur in the House amendment to S. 365, the debt ceiling and spending reduction agreement. The president signed the bill into law later in the day.
Now "the worm turns." I mean the president is sifting the focus and the message. His major focus is seeking new taxes (revenue) through the mantra of shared sacrifice. He said,
"…since you can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach where everything is on the table. …It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share. And it means getting rid of taxpayer subsidies to oil and gas companies, and tax loopholes that help billionaires pay a lower tax rate than teachers and nurses. …Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair. That’s the principle I’ll be fighting for during the next phase of this process."
Note, how Obama presumed that the debt cannot be address primarily by cutting Big Government programs.
Gary Bauer noted today, "But, of course, there is no demand for higher taxes from Americans. They want to know, "Where are the jobs?" The unemployment rate today is 9.2%, higher than it was when Obama took office in 2009. His $830 billion stimulus bill has been a colossal failure. And because of that failure and others, America is suffering from a jobs deficit.
A new report this morning suggests that mass layoffs have returned. More than 66,000 Americans were laid off last month -- up 60% from June and 59% higher than last July. Many of these losses came from industries (healthcare and defense) that have been under assault by the Obama Administration.
Yet, while Obama claims to care about job creation, he regularly launches into attacks on job creators, vowing to raise their taxes. A day does not go by without Obama attacking entrepreneurs and stoking the fires of class warfare."
Ezra Klein, a "liberal" Washington Post blogger, today is urging Democrats to let ALL of the Bush tax cuts expire -- not just those for the wealthy: "Now let's say the tax side goes according to the White House's plan: Most of the Bush tax cuts are extended, but the break for income of more than $250,000 a year expires. Are we done? … In 2021, that scenario would leave the debt above 75 percent of GDP -- and growing. …it doesn't leave us at all prepared to deal with costs related to the retiring baby boomers. …
"Next year, the Bush tax cuts expire. If Congress does nothing, we revert to Clinton-era tax rates for everyone, and the federal coffers fill with $3.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next 10 years -- enough to stabilize deficits. …To govern responsibly, Democrats cannot simply raise taxes on the rich and call it a day."
Bauer responds, "As I have said before, there aren't enough rich people in America and they are not rich enough to pay for all of Obama's spending. Liberals don't want to cut government; they want to raise YOUR taxes to pay for their ever-growing bureaucracy."
Politico’s Playbook reported yesterday, “EXCLUSIVE -- OBAMA AND SENATE DEMS PLAN PIVOT TO JOBS: Senate Democrats hope they now have ‘checked the box’ on debt reduction and can move to an agenda focused on job creation and economic growth, through a combination of spending and tax cuts. Dems want to change the subject fast, and polls show the need to talk more about jobs.”
But Obama has made many similar announcements before. As Politico’s Ben Smith wrote, “Mike Allen’s note this morning that ‘Dems plan pivot to jobs’ sounded awfully familiar to me, as it apparently did to the Republican National Committee, which promptly turned out a list of 15 occasions on which the White House had allegedly announced a similar pivot.” Smith explained, “[T]he underlying truth of the presidency is that through a mixture of choice -- health care -- and circumstance -- the Arab Spring, the Japan earthquake -- Obama has spent very little of his presidency publicly driving a conversation about jobs. . . . And the story of the Administration is, in no small part, one of a constant attempt to pivot formally to jobs.”
Yet Americans should turn a skeptical eye to the Obama administration and Democrats on jobs, given their track record. It was a year ago today that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote his New York Times op-ed titled “Welcome To The Recovery.” In the piece, Geithner argued that “a review of recent data on the American economy shows that we are on a path back to growth.”
Unfortunately, the data a year later aren’t any better. In fact, just last Saturday The Wall Street Journal reported, “The economic recovery is grinding to a halt, raising the risk that the U.S. could fall back into recession and tightening the screws on Washington to resolve a debt-ceiling debate that threatens to inflict further damage on a fragile economy. Gross domestic product—the sum of goods and services produced in the U.S. and the broadest tally of economic growth—increased at a paltry 1.3% annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. First-quarter revisions—down to 0.4% from 1.9%—reflected an economy at a near-standstill early in the year. That minimal growth, coming after a recession that new data show was deeper than previously thought, raises doubts about the economy’s trajectory for the rest of the year and helps explain the unusually feeble pace of job growth for a recovery entering its third year.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday, “Things actually have gotten worse since the president came to office and we need to move in a different direction. We don’t believe and the American people don’t believe that raising taxes, job-killing tax increases in the middle of this serious recession is the direction we ought to take, and the bill we just passed avoided doing that, even though the administration desperately wanted to raise taxes. . . . I’m often asked, ‘What would you do to get the economy going?’ My answer is always the same, we need to quit doing what we’ve been doing. Quit borrowing. Quit spending. Quit trying to raise taxes. Quit overregulating and let the private sector flourish so we have a chance again to have a growing economy which of course will produce more revenue for the government.”
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