It’s a scene that has been created for his throng of adoring fans in times past. Not so long ago the great oracle of reverberating platitudes was expertly placed betwixt Corinthian columns admonishing America to look past his lack of experience and loathing of country and focus on how fabulously he delivers a speech with love from a teleprompter. It was classic Barack Obama. He was in fine form. A speech laced with the honeyed banalities that famously hypnotized the willing like the head of Medusa on Athena’s shield. Entertaining and replete with goose bumps like the tingle up Chris Matthews’ leg, Obama’s speech was vintage in its charm and magnetism. He even made me, one who knows not to look into Medusa’s eyes, feel and not just hear his words. We want to believe him. We hope we can believe him. That is until one realizes that this is political Groundhog Day.
What Obama offered was nothing imaginative or new and certainly not outside of his comfort zone. He proposes that we spend more money to create jobs (wink, wink) and that every penny spent will be paid for entirely (wink). Thankfully, I have not lost my mind, nor have the majority of the American people. He has tried most of this in some measure and has made sure to offset it all with astronomical spending. In short the American Jobs Act, promises long, but only shortly delivers. A lynch pin of the act, is the cuts in payroll taxes. This will gut funding for Social Security and Medicaid. For all the talk of Republicans wanting to throw grannies off of the cliff earlier in the summer, this is the ultimate send off. The $4,000 tax credit for new hires who have spent more than six months looking for a job, a tax cut for new hires and a tax cut for those business who increase wages does not an economy grow. What difference does this all make if no one is hiring? If this all sounds vaguely familiar do not adjust your computer screen or hit the refresh button, it is because it has all been foisted on businesses before. Last year the President embarrassed himself by blaming businesses for not hiring after he had so wisely told them that they were free to do so because of his tax credits and tax cuts for expansion.
Let me jog your memory. It was called the HIRE Act signed into law by Obama in March of 2010. CBS described it as such:
The bill mandates that payroll taxes will be forgiven for businesses that hire someone who has been unemployed for at least two months;
It will permit small businesses to write off investments they make in equipment this year;
It will reform municipal bonds to expand investment in schools and clean energy;
And it will continue roadway infrastructure investment into the spring and summer, when, the president said, construction jobs pick up.
These cuts in payroll taxes and tax credits do not solve the problem of high unemployment in this country because it does not address the reason for the nationwide hiring freeze. In short, high unemployment is a side effect of a slow down in a nation’s economy. Businesses look for the stability of maintaining their workforce and forego the risk of adding to their rosters thereby increasing expenses. These recessions are cyclical and when left to heal itself, exemplified in the crash of ’21, the market will correct itself and quickly. However, when the government takes this as an opportunity to never “let a crisis go to waste”, you will see the crash of ‘29, but you will get the deep recession and subsequent depression that followed engineered by the good, sometimes even nefarious, intentions of bureaucrats and their interests.
In addition to creating more jobs, according to President Obama, this bill will fix our roads and bridges along with various other forms of infrastructure, fix our schools, put all of our teachers back to work, veterans will be hired, unemployment insurance extended, construction increased, cuts in government spending, reduction of the deficit, and the discovery of unicorns while confirming Darwin’s theory of evolution with fossil evidence. (I might have added the last two, but if he could promise the world I figured a few more addendums for my own amusement can’t hurt.) All this on the heels of Obama giving Solyndra Inc, a solar panels manufacturer in California, over $535 million in federal stimulus loan guarantees in 2010. This same company has since declared bankruptcy and as of September 8, 2011 is being investigated by the FBI. This president gave away $535 million dollars of taxpayer money to a clean energy initiative, per the HIRE Act, and ended up losing jobs and an enormous amount of public money! Obama said several times during this speech that it was all just “simple math.” Well, I say that someone should give this president a calculator and gift him with a tax credit if he uses it.
R.L. Ward
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