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| Pix Via Michelle Malkin (Nov. 2010) |
Yesterday, President Obama delivered his $447 billion jobs proposal to Congress. Even the news services used negative statements:
CNBC: Obama's Job Plan May Force US to Raise Debt Limit Again
AP: The jobs plan is an IOU
The Atlantic: Obama's Job Plan: A Never-Never Bill
Business Insider: Obama's Jobs Plan To Raise $400 Billion In Taxes
Last night, the Senate failed to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to H.J. Res. 66, by a vote of 53-33. Today, the Senate resumed consideration of the motion to proceed to H.J. Res. 66, the Burma sanctions bill, which Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wants to use as a vehicle for unpaid-for FEMA funding. Senate Leader Reid may schedule another cloture vote on the motion to proceed to H.J. Res. 66 as a vehicle for FEMA funds.
The Wall Street Journal reports today: “The prospects for President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs plan grew dimmer Monday as he unveiled the fine print of how it would be paid for—primarily through tax increases that Republicans said would destroy jobs, not create them. . . . Republicans in Congress . . . disputed the White House contention that the plan would cause no additional job losses for the struggling economy. ‘It would be fair to say this tax increase on job creators is the kind of proposal both parties have opposed in the past,’ said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio). ‘We remain eager to work together on ways to support job growth, but this proposal doesn't appear to have been offered in that bipartisan spirit.’”
And The Hill noted yesterday, “The White House said Monday that President Obama wants to pay for his $447 billion jobs bill by raising taxes on the wealthy and businesses. Jack Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), said the tax hikes would pay for Obama’s entire bill, which the administration is sending to Congress Monday evening.”
Reacting to this news in a speech on the floor this morning,
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) shared that Republicans have a "different approach" to job creation than set forth in the Presidents job plan. Boehner said, “As a former small businessman myself, I can tell you that we’ve got a little different approach to creating jobs than our friends across the aisle. When you look at what we saw in the president’s pay-for’s yesterday, we see permanent tax increases put into effect in order to pay for temporary spending. I just don’t think that’s really going to help our economy the way it could.”
He added, “While there’s a lot of uncertainty out there, what I’ve seen over the last six straight weeks is a lot of that uncertainty is turning to certainty and the certainty is resulting in fear. Fear that the economy isn’t coming back anytime soon,” Boehner warned. “All of the efforts that the administration tried when they had total control of the House and the Senate and the White House, they have not worked. And as we get into this conversation with the president about we help our economy, I hope he’ll listen to our ideas, and I hope that he’ll work with us to find common ground to get our economy moving and create jobs again.”
"What the American employers want is they want some certainly about what’s happening in Washington. “Certainty about what tax rates are going to be, certainty about what their health care commitments are going to be, and certainty about the regulatory onslaught that they’re under,” Boehner said. “These are the kinds of things that need to be addressed if we’re going to create the kind of environment where employers will feel comfortable in adding more employees to their companies.”
Boehner identified that he is awaiting the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the President's 155-page bill. He said he expected the bill to begin moving through committees as Republicans continue pushing their own agenda on the House floor including "legislation this week that stops the government from telling companies where and where they cannot locate."
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell also responded to the Presidents job's bill, “Last week, President Obama came up to Capitol Hill to unveil a stimulus bill he’s calling a jobs plan; and yesterday, the White House explained how they’d like to pay for it. . . . The first thing to say about this plan is that it’s now obvious why the President left out the specifics last week. Not only does it reveal the political nature of this bill, it also reinforces the growing perception that this administration isn’t all that interested in economic policies that will actually work. . . . [T]he specifics we got yesterday only reinforce the impression that this was largely a political exercise. For one, they undermine the President’s claim that it’s a bipartisan proposal — because much of what he’s proposing has already been rejected on a bipartisan basis. The half-trillion dollar tax hike the White House proposed yesterday will not only face a tough road in Congress among Republicans, but from Democrats too.”
Leader McConnell explained, “The central tax hike included in this bill, capping deductions for individuals and small businesses, was already dismissed by a filibuster-proof, Democrat-controlled Senate in 2009. Another idea floated by the White House yesterday, a tax on investment income, has been vehemently opposed by the Number Three Democrat in the Senate, among others. And a proposal to raise taxes on the oil and gas industry was rejected as the job-destroying tax hike that it is by Democrats and Republicans just a few months ago. And for good reason, since the non-partisan Congressional Research Service tells us it wouldn’t only raise gas prices, but would also move jobs overseas. So claiming this bill is bipartisan may sound good if you’re out there on the campaign trail. But surely the President could come up with some proposals that both sides hadn’t rejected already.”
He then summed up what President Obama is proposing: “The President knows raising taxes is the last thing you want to do to spur job creation. He’s said so himself. Yet that’s basically all he’s proposing here: temporary stimulus to be paid for later by permanent tax hikes, so that when the dust clears, and the economy is no better off than it was after the first stimulus, folks find themselves with an even bigger tax bill than today. The President can call this bill whatever he wants. But in reality, all he’s really doing is just proposing a hodge-podge of retread ideas aimed at convincing people that a temporary fix is really permanent and that it will create permanent jobs. And then daring Republicans to vote against it.
“Well, I think most people see through all this. I think most Americans are smarter than that. I think they know our economic challenges are more serious than this and that they require serious, long-term solutions. I think the American people realize we can do a lot better.”
President Obama reacts by traveling to Speaker Boehner's state, Ohio, to demagogue his jobs bill.
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