At 10:30 this morning, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (created by the debt ceiling spending cuts agreement) held its first public meeting.
The Senate resumed consideration of H.R. 1249, the patent reform bill. Around 4 PM, the Senate will hold a series of votes. The first 3 votes will be on amendments to the bill offered by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Tom Coburn (R-OK). Following the amendment votes, the Senate will vote on final passage of H.R. 1249.
At 7 PM, the Senate will join the House for a Joint Session of Congress for an address from President Obama. Following the Joint Session, the Senate will reconvene in the Senate chamber and vote on the motion to proceed to S.J. Res. 25, introduced by Leader McConnell, disapproving of deny the president’s request to increase the debt limit an additional $500 billion.
The Hill is reporting that a "Senate committee approved today a short-term extension of the highway spending bill that authorizes Congress to collect the federal gas tax. The measure is an eighth extension of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) that was expired in 2009. Transportation advocates have pushed for a long-term bill, but the Republican-led House and the Democratically-controlled Senate have offered vastly different versions of the bill. The House proposal would spend $235 billion over six years on transportation, while the Senate has suggested spending $109 billion over two years."
Insurance Journal also noted that "the Senate Committee on Banking and Urban Affairs passed its version of a bill to reauthorize and reform the financing of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The NFIP — which is $18 billion in debt largely as a result of claims from Hurricane Katrina — is set to expire at the end of the month unless Congress acts.
The legislation — called the ‘Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act’ — would reform parts of the NFIP and extend it for five years. The bill now goes to the full Senate for consideration. The House passed H.R. 1309, the ‘Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2011,’ by a wide margin, 406-22, before the August recess. Both measures would move the program toward sounder financial operations and require that premiums be raised to levels actuaries say reflect the true risk of flooding. Many homeowners now pay subsidized rates."
In an op-ed for Politico today previewing the president’s speech, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell writes, “President Barack Obama will reportedly do two things in his speech to a joint session of Congress tonight: ask us to believe that a second stimulus will be more effective than his first; and pin the blame on others for a jobs crisis that his own economic policies have done more than anything else to perpetuate. Such a speech would, no doubt, cheer the most ardent Democratic partisans. But it would do nothing to create jobs. That’s why many of us believe the president should instead begin by candidly acknowledging the failures of an economic agenda that centers on massive government spending and debt. . . . Here’s the bottom line: There are now 1.7 million fewer jobs in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, than there were before the president signed the economic stimulus into law. By the president’s own standards, in other words, the centerpiece of his jobs agenda has been a failure. At this point, most Americans have concluded that the problem with our economy isn’t that Washington is doing too little — but that it’s doing too much.”
He elaborated in a speech on the Senate floor this morning, “I’d say that Americans have 1.7 million reasons to oppose another Stimulus. And that’s why many of us have been calling on the President to propose something different tonight. Not because of politics. But because the kind of policies he’s proposed have failed. The problem here isn’t politics. The problem is policy. . . . So tonight, the President should take a different approach. He should acknowledge the failures of an economic agenda that centers on government spending and debt, and work across the aisle on a plan that puts people and businesses at the forefront of job creation.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman House RSC commented, "For the last two and a half years, Washington’s prescription for our fragile economy has been more government intrusion and interference. Whether it’s ObamaCare, the NLRB telling businesses how and where they can do business, or the Obama administration throwing $535 million of taxpayer money into a now-bankrupt solar panel company, the constant theme has been that Washington knows better than its citizens how their money should be spent. Families and businesses don’t need the government telling them how to succeed. What they need is the freedom to succeed without the constant threat of new costs, disruptions, and interference from the federal bureaucracy. I hope President Obama keeps this in mind on Thursday during the “jobs speech” he’s been touting for the last month.
ABC News examines the stimulus’ infrastructure spending, reporting today, “President Obama isn’t likely to use the term ‘shovel-ready’ in his jobs speech tonight, but he is expected to call for billions in new government spending for infrastructure projects he believes will lead to immediate hiring. . . . If the refrain sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Sources knowledgeable about the administration proposals say Obama might seek to fast-track up to $50 billion in infrastructure spending in the next year as part of a broader transportation package, an idea he first proposed a year ago but which failed to gain traction. . . . A January 2010 Associated Press analysis of Recovery Act found spending on roads and bridges ‘had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry,’ regardless of how many dollars lawmakers threw at the various projects.”
And The Wall Street Journal explains the overall failure of the stimulus in an editorial: “Even zero jobs growth in August doesn't seem to have disrupted President Obama's faith in the economic policies of his first three years, so one theme we'll be listening for in tonight's speech is how he explains the current moment. Why did his first jobs plan—the $825 billion stimulus—so quickly result in the need for another jobs plan? For readers who want to know, an important account is offered in a pair of new Mercatus Center working papers by the George Mason economists Garett Jones and Daniel Rothschild, who did field research on what they call the supply side of the stimulus. . . . In the first paper, the authors survey 85 different businesses, nonprofits and local governments across the country and conclude that ‘As is often the case when economic models are transferred from the blackboard to actual public policy, there was a gap between theory and practice.’ . . . The second paper suggests that the stimulus did not ‘create or save’ nearly as many jobs as the models indicate. On the basis of 1,300 interviews, Messrs. Jones and Rothschild estimate that merely 42.1% of the firms that received grants hired people who were unemployed. Instead, they poached workers from their competitors.”
The WSJ editorial concludes, “The lesson of such on-the-ground knowledge is that the stimulus was a lost opportunity. In practice it became a shotgun marriage between an economic theory justified by computer models and 40 years of liberal social priorities (clean energy, Medicaid expansions and the rest). This produced the 9.1% unemployment we now have. The economy would have benefited far more if the government had instead improved the incentives for people and businesses to invest, produce and grow. The President probably won't mention any of this, but it does explain why he has to give his latest speech.”
American frustrations are running high. Today, one reader suggested: "Let's hold the paychecks of the president, vice president, their staff advisers, and all house & senate members until they resolve the jobs crisis, reduce government spending, and the debt ceiling crisis!"
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