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.
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.
