Saturday, September 10, 2011

A Speech is Not a Plan

Thursday was President Obama's address to Congress and the nation on his latest "jobs plan".  For the better part of 3 years Obama has tried and failed in his efforts to re-energize the American economy, now he looks to introduce yet another potential solution.  And he wants his plan passed.  Just in case anyone in Congress didn't know that Obama supports Obama's "American Jobs Act", he told them to pass it.  Not once, not twice, but seventeen times.

To reinforce the message that they do indeed want their proposal passed, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett went on MSNBC and said the same thing.  While that's the official White House message, it's what Jarrett admitted after saying Congress should pass their plan immediately.  Turns out the plan hasn't been written yetTo quote Jarrett:
The President is going to draft the legislation, make the job a little easier for Congress and send it up there next week.
Next week?  This plan is something the Obama administration has been talking about publicly for weeks, and surely had been contemplating privately before that, yet instead of coming to Congress and the American people with the bill in his hand ready to go Obama gave us a general outline of a plan.  There's nothing on paper, no specific points to debate or have the CBO analyze, yet the mantra is to pass this currently nonexistent bill.  Obama's taken a page out of the Wimpy playbook: he will gladly give us a plan next week for agreements to pass it today.

One of the few specific promises from Obama's speech was that his bill will be fully paid for.  It's possible it will be, but it won't be done by Obama.  Rather than take a stand and announce that he will make the cuts necessary to make this deficit neutral, the President passed the buck to the super-committee of 12.  Obama has tasked the members, already charged with reducing the deficit $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years, with finding another 447 billion in reductions in order to make his own plan deficit neutral.  I'm all for reducing the deficit, but for Obama to claim that telling someone else to make the cuts is paying for the bill is grossly irresponsible.

This current proposal is just the latest example of a Presidency with far more style than substance.  Only a President so devoted to style could insist upon Congress passing a bill that doesn't even exist yet, or claim to be paying for their plan by asking others to do that work for them.  Like so many other actions during this Presidency, Obama's "American Jobs Act" is designed to save exact one job in this nation: his own.


9 comments:

  1. And the Republican plan is?

    There is none. It's just oppose anything Obama does and hope the economy doesn't improve despite their obstruction.

    The GOP stopped caring about governing. It's just concerned about politics. The fact that Eric Cantor now says disaster aid must be paid for by cuts when he's never taken that position for disaster aid for his own State or the Bush tax cuts... or Medicare prescription drug benefit, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Katrina...

    The Party of Nope, You Can't.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If a Speech is not a plan, how did Kasich endorse it, then?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's the bill, all 299 pages of it.

    http://www.slideshare.net/whitehouse/american-jobs-act-9230256

    You were saying?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah Modern, still toiling in the liberal fields I see.

    Tell me, have you seen the 3 minute video about union thuggery that the Romney campaign published?

    Here is it is:
    http://youtu.be/yj6yFmOnlXw

    I'm still laughing at Modern's attempt to defend Hoffa by blaming us. Classic liberal. Absolutely classic. It is all because we just don't understand life the way liberals do. In the world view of liberals Hoffa's words and union thug actions are completely seperate. yeah, right.

    The fact remains, the unions are thugs and the American people are getting reminders of this daily.

    Have you seen the video of the longshoreman from Washington? Here's the link:
    http://youtu.be/bzoMNgDMELo

    Warning, this is NOT OK for work.

    These are the people that Modern stands with. We must never forget that. If the Democrats and their liberal allies prevail in Ohio, this is what we can expect. A state run by thugs whose foul mouths and threatening demeanor are exactly what Modern and his ilk wish on us.

    No thanks.

    You want a plan? How about the Ryan plan? Hmmmmm? How about cut cap and balance, hmmmm?

    got a problem with lowering taxes, rolling back regulations and decreasing spending Modern?

    The simple fact is this Modern: you HAVE to write what you do because Obama's approach, and the liberal dogma that birthed it, are failing badly. Liberalism right now is trying hard to do two things: Change the subject and assault its critics.

    The ugly scent of repudiation is in the air. Losing NY 9, little Weiner's seat, will be a total repudiation of the Democrat party, in a Democrat stronghold.

    I'd love for the economy to improve. My wife and I started a business a year ago and we're dying. Everything we own is in that business and we're dying. Do you really think that, given that fact, I want continued economic failure? Of course I don't.

    The economy isn't stumbling because Obama can't get his way. Hell he had years of an unassailable majority. He got everything he wanted. The fact is what he wanted was bad for us as the current situation clearly illustrates.

    So the liberal two step won't work this time. You tried calling us racist. You tried calling us barbarians. You tried lying through your teeth about us. You tried all the old tricks but the economy tells the American people all we need to know.

    I'm old enough to remember carter. Heck, I voted for that fool (something I will have to discuss with St Peter). By the end of his only term in office we were heartily sick of him. We're getting tired of Obama too.

    How many days till the election?

    Remember those bumper stickers the lefties used during the Bush years? Let's do some vue jah day all over again:

    If you're not outraged, your not paying attention (Gibson guitar ring a bell?)

    1/20/13 can't get here soon enough.

    skip

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm saying the exact same thing I said Saturday. Obama went to Congress Thursday saying pass this bill immediately when there was no bill in existence then. He claims the bill is paid for, but passes that responsibility off to the supercommittee. None of that has changed.

    Jarrett said they still had to draft it and that it would be ready the following week. Now it is the following week and the bill is finished. Congratulations to President Obama for finally presenting a bill.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @coelho

    Yes, and the bill is already getting scrutiny. Andrew stiles has an early review at the corner on NRO.

    Remember Strickland's favorite boondoggle Low speed rail? well Obama's proposed legislation includes $4 billion for rail.

    My personal theory is that the left is trying hard to one up itself. The Big Dig, in Boston, was such a huge waste of money that it has set the bar quite high.

    and the infrastructure bank looks for all the world like the return of the son of Fannie Mae. A group of unaccountable bureaucrats decide how to spend the money the federal government confiscates from us.

    Yup, Obama's plan in two steps:

    (1) take all the money from the citizens
    (2) Give it to friends.

    skip

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wow Modern, the GOP on Planet Plunderbund sounds scary!

    Here on Earth, this guy named Paul Ryan came up with a budget that closes tax loopholes, makes U.S. tax rates more competitive globally, and prevents the otherwise inevitable bankruptcy of the entitlement plans you Progressives love so much. The GOP-controlled House passed it months ago, but the Dem-controlled Senate hasn't passed a budget in over two years.

    "The Party of Nope" is a stupid criticism when the far-left Democratic Party's only idea is to spend, spend, spend money we haven't got. It's not improved by being patently false.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The plan was announced on Thursday, and was publicly available in bill form as early Monday. That's not a week.

    You can change the topic all you want, but the reality is that this site GROSSLY (and intentionally) misrepresented Hoffa's comments and took them totally out of context.

    The Ryan plan, which included a plan to privatize Medicare is dead.

    I think it's funny you guys think one special election dictates the election... and not the others that have occurred since 2010... like the one in NY-26?

    Who was Governor of MA during the Big Dig? Oh, yeah, Mitt Romney.

    The White House has also put forth a plan on closing tax loopholes to pay for the plan.

    You guys keep grasping at straws that vanish as soon as you think you have them in your grasp.

    The Ryan Plan was a plan to balance the budget, not improve the economy because it won't as just about every economist who has reviewed it has concluded.

    ReplyDelete
  9. still more piffle from Modern.

    Obama made his speech, then he provided the bill. So congress was being exhorted to pass a piece of legislation it had never seen. That worked fine for Obamacare but NOMAS Modern.

    Further, I note with some amusement that modern can't really comment on the actual contents of Obama's bill. Gosh, I wonder why.

    No one has misrepresented Hoffa. He said exactly what we've come to expect from a thug. I have provided a few examples of union thuggery fimed over the past few days, just to remind Modern that these are the people with whom he stands. Life without shame must be interesting, n'est ce pas?

    Of course Democrats would love to pronounce the Ryan plan dead. But then again these are the folks that think that Al Gore is telling them the truth. Their ability to make political judgements seems quite flawed to me.

    and who the govenor was during the big dig matters about as much as who the pope was at that time. The fact remains: government infrastructure programs massively waste taxpayer funds.

    Here's a quote from a well footnoted study:

    "Not all government highway projects are as mismanaged as the Big Dig, but cost overruns and delays are routine. A Government Accountability Office study found that half of the federal highway projects it examined had cost overruns of more than 25 percent.6"

    Here's the addy:
    http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/government-cost-overruns#end_6

    Raising the point about Romney is just a stupid attempt to change the subject. Something liberals tend to do when they sense that they are losing the argument. It is unimpressive at best.

    A question for Modern: have you read Obama's bill? Can you describe for us, in lurid detail, exactly how Obama will go about "closing loopholes"?

    Here is a brief precis from "the hill"
    http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/180927-obama-proposes-tax-hikes-on-wealthy-business-to-pay-for-447b-jobs-bill

    yeah, sure eliminate itemized deductions for people making over 200K. That's liberalese for "punish success and reward failure). That's all folks like Modern understand.

    This is just vintage Obama and it stinks.

    and yes, the Ryan plan was aimed at balancing the budget. You remember budgets don't you Modern? How long was it before the Democrats who controlled congress went without discharging their duty to create a budget?

    And do you have some sort of problem with America balancing its budget?

    i thought so.

    skip

    ReplyDelete

No profanity, keep it clean.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.