Ezra Klein calls it the “now more than ever” plan:
Academic books pack about 600 words to a page. Normal books clock in around 400. Large-print books — you know, the ones for kids or the visually impaired — fit about 250. The House GOP’s jobs plan, however, gets about 200 words to a page. The typeface is fit for giants, and the document’s 10 pages are mostly taken up by pictures. It looks like the staffer in charge forgot the assignment was due on Thursday rather than Friday, and so cranked the font up to 24 and began dumping clip art to pad out the plan.Which is odd, because there’s nothing in this plan that hasn’t been in a thousand other plans. When I asked David Autor, an economist at MIT and a specialist on labor markets, to take a look at the substance, he pronounced it a classic case of “what Larry Summers would call ‘now-more-than-everism.’”
“Here’s how it works,” Autor wrote in am e-mail. “1. You have a set of policies that you favor at all times and under all circumstances, e.g., cut taxes, remove regulations, drill-baby-drill, etc. 2. You see a problem that needs fixing (e.g., the economy stinks). 3. You say, ‘We need to enact my favored policies now more than ever.’ I believe that every item in the GOP list that you sent derives from this three step procedure.
Steve Benen calls the plan “a bad joke“:
… the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either don’t care or can’t understand the famous axiom: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.
It’s as if someone bought an iPod, uploaded one song, and hit “shuffle.”
Jon Perr focuses on what’s left out of this plan — any mention of the author of our jobs crisis, not to mention any explanation of how the same exact economic prescription that got us into this mess is going to get us out:
On Thursday, John Boehner and the House Republican leadership team unveiled their “Plan for America’s Job Creators.” As he repeatedly made clear before the Economic Club of New York and again on CBS Face the Nation, Boehner’s “job creators” are the top two percent of income earners whose Bush tax cuts President Obama has proposed ending. And that presents a bit of problem for the Republicans. After all, George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover. Which means the GOP plan for America’s job creators is just another tax cut windfall for the gilded class.
Earlier this month, Speaker Boehner warned that “The mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators — uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs.” As he told Harry Smith of CBS two weeks ago:
“The top one percent of wage earners in the United States…pay forty percent of the income taxes…The people he’s {President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy.”
If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6% during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.
You could call it The Marriage Vows Plan. You know:
We, the Republican Party, take tax cuts for the rich, spending cuts for the poor, rolled-back regulations, free trade, and drill baby drill to be our sole and only plan, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish ’till death do us part. And hereto we pledge you our faithfulness.
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