Why the Rush To Pass the American Jobs Act (Guest Voice)
Why the Rush To Pass the American Jobs Act?
by Susan Stamper Brown
As the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launches an ad campaign in battleground states to promote rapid passage of President Barack Obama’s “American Jobs Act,” I cannot help but to ask, “Why the rush, Mr. President?”
While proposed payroll tax cuts would be useful to hard-working coupon-clipping Americans, common sense suggests that something is wrong, if, during a Joint Session of Congress, the president demands 14 different times to “pass this bill now.”
My father taught me well; high-pressure sales pitches never end well for the consumer. Another wise father, Lord Chesterfield, also taught his child well in 1749, when he said, “Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about to do is too big for him.”
Considering the abject failure of the administration’s previous mammoth-sized stimulus “jobs” bill, why would anyone with common sense consider a similar bill, about half the size, could create jobs? In what can only be perceived as a slick Chicago-style political maneuver, the administration is attempting to divert attention away from past failures and place the responsibility of excessive debt and unemployment in Congress’ corner.
Americans should think twice before hopping on the Democrats’ bandwagon bound for bankruptcy, and instead urge elected representatives to pass a bill to disable regulations that are strangling business owners and entrepreneurs. Much like the “jobs saved or created” in the previous stimulus bill, the American Jobs Act, will only put a bandage over the gushing artery that is our economy; a frightfully expensive gimmick to drive down unemployment numbers temporarily, and thereby bolstering Obama’s re-election chances in 2012.
America learned the costly lesson of jumping headlong into a cement pond before checking first to see if it had water. Taxpayers (and future taxpayers) have not yet recovered from injuries suffered from the last Stimulus bill which was supposed to settle unemployment at or below 8 percent. And, only heaven knows the economic ramifications of Obamacare.
The original Stimulus bill has proven to be a “gift that keeps on taking.” The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) August 24, 2011, Annual Summer Update, reported that the unemployment rate “will remain above 8 percent until 2014.”
Nearly $800 billion was “invested” chasing shiny objects to no avail. A prime example is the recipient of a $535 million U.S. Treasury loan guarantee who just went belly up — sending upwards of 1100 workers to the unemployment lines and leaving taxpayers with the tab. The solar panel company, Solyndra, was the third U.S. solar company to go bankrupt in recent weeks due to apparent subsidized competition from China.
Back in 2010, Obama stood in Solyndra’s plant avowing the “future is here.” If it is, the future looks a bit dismal. And, once again, we are expected to trust the president’s judgment and blindly march to cliff’s edge as mindless lemmings. It may be a better time to slow down to consider the danger of haste and the value of deliberateness. And, maybe pause to pray — before we plunge.
© Copyright 2011 Susan Stamper Brown. Susan’s weekly column is nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate and is licensed to run on TMV in full.
17 Responses to “Why the Rush To Pass the American Jobs Act (Guest Voice)”
“It may be a better time to slow down to consider the danger of haste and the value of deliberateness. And, maybe pause to pray — before we plunge.”
Would that be the strategy of the near-decade before this, that time that put us in a near-depression before 2008? Wouldn’t want to rush things, would we?
And pray? Didn’t we get enough confirmation of “gut feeling” from the higher Father with our last administration? How’d that work out for us?
At what time do we switch strategies?
We’ve already done more than 10 times this “stimulus” in the last three years, which has still left us with close to 10% “official” unemployment. Why would this time be different?
Prof, get your facts right, please. We have not spent over $4 trillion in attempts at stimulus. Keep claiming it all you want to but that won’t make it true.
Why exactly is this piece on The Moderate Voice? It is pretty much straight polemic. Intelligent discussion is not what you get by alternating pro- and anti- rabble-rousing. It is what you get by having intelligent people try to comment rationally.
LOL
Susan Stamper Brown makes me wish for more Michael Reagan.
How about more stimulus and less tax cuts. Voodoo economics was shot down by Bush 41 before he became VP…
PeteMcManus says:
September 13, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Why exactly is this piece on The Moderate Voice? It is pretty much straight polemic. Intelligent discussion is not what you get by alternating pro- and anti- rabble-rousing. It is what you get by having intelligent people try to comment rationally.
Pete, we will afford your editorial commentary consideration once we see you bother to put up the same post on the next Ed Dionne, Tina Dupuy, Walter Braash, Michael Stickings, Hart Williams, Ron Beasley, Robert Stein, Joe Windish, Kathy Gill or the one that I don’t even bother to acknowledge.
Yeah, I know, you had so many to choose from, you couldn’t bring yourself to a decision.
CO You must be joking. This authors site is all style with no substance. Give me the Dutch Lad’s mentor at All Things Beautiful . While I/m no fan of ATB, at least her writing is “smarter than a fifth grader” and the graphics are tasteful.
rudi, you miss my point. Since posters who have been around long enough to name the Dutch Boy by name don’t get a vote on editorial balance, certainly one-post drivebys shouldn’t even dare to suggest it.
Once you do the time, you can do the crime.
CO Please explain how SSB has any substance. When she can tie Victor Hanson to a post I’ll give her some credit. But comparing the cost of gasoline, Starbucks coffee and her love of off-roading isn’t blogging, it’s mental flogging of her readers.
This post is in such poor taste that I even Rush Limpbaugh would be embarrassed.
http://www.susanstamperbrown.com/2011/08/obama-and-democrats-are-in-denial/#more-676
@Jim
If you have to label the thing “stimulus” for it to count as stimulus, then you have a point. Me, I think Vietnam was a war, not a police action; that they used torture, not enhanced interrogation, at Gitmo, and that stimulus is spending money that wasn’t taxed. In other words, if it looks like duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has wings, waterproof feathers, a bill and webbed feet, lays eggs, swims, and flies, it’s a duck.
According to USGovernmentRevenue.com, debt in 2011 is $18,093.69 billion, (I’m using change in debt, because that’s what the basic definition of deficit should be) where it was $14,539.40 billion in 2009, for a total of $3,554.29 of new debt in two years. Then we add in about $1,400 billion for QE1 and $600 billion for QE2 of newly created money, and you’ve got about $5,500 billion borrowed or created since 2009.
That’s a ludicrous definition, Prof. You obviously have duck blindness. It’s those ideological blinders that do it every time.
@Jim
Prof’s definition is the same as the one in every Macro 101 textbook. Yours, not so much.
“duck blindness”
Deficit spending != stimulus spending
The problem with that classical definition is that it treats economies as closed systems. Any contribution to the deficit from tax cuts (Or tax dodges for that matter.) doesn’t necessarily stay in the country to stimulate our country’s economy. This is a flaw in any stimulus that isn’t that well targeted, whether it’s Obama proposing it or some Republican who just wants tax cuts.
Jim,
I’m glad that the macro textbooks are wrong and you are right. The reason the macro textbooks are wrong is that you can’t actually say what deficit spending is “paid for” by borrowing and what spending is paid for by taxes. Thus all borrowing is stimulus.
Where I think you are right is that fiscal stimulus is much less effective in a global economy. Somehow, that doesn’t stop the macro modelers from using historical data to build the models.