There is a good reason Obama did not unveil his jobs bill prior to his jobs speech.
It’s because the jobs bill is not a jobs bill, it is the tax increase Obama has been hoping for since he was a candidate, taking $400 billion from people making $200,000 or more (couples making $250,000 or more). Had Obama released the plan, all the talk surrounding the speech would have been about the tax increase, the opposite of what the Axelplouffe message machine wanted.
What Obama misleadingly calls a jobs bill literally takes $400 billion from the demonized “top 2%” over 10 years to give to almost everyone else now, a pure redistributionist plan. There is some revenue taken from oil companies and corporate jet owners (yes, that’s in there), but that is just political cover, a relatively small percentage of the total tax increase, as this chart shows:
The jobs bill is an election year payoff, a bribe by another name, or if you will, walking around money.
There is almost nothing stimulative about the bill from a job growth perspective. No regulations which stifle business are revoked, the cloud of Obamacare lingers, and class warfare on the job producers moves ahead.
Of course Obama wants it passed “immediately,” because it cannot withstand the light of day. Sunlight will make it stink even more than it already does.
There will be a tendency to want to play ball with Obama. And perhaps there are a small number of its provisions which might be worthwhile, but the package is a pathetic joke on the American people. It will damage job growth while allowing Obama to say otherwise, a pretend jobs plan.
It may be, as Meghan McArdle (via Instapundit) suggests, that Obama has no intention of passing the jobs plan, that it’s just part of the perpetual campaign:
… I really wish that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.
This plan stinks, it is everything that is wrong about this administration and this President. Expose it for what it is, loudly and clearly.
The American people are wiser now than they were in 2008, they can handle the truth.
Update: Told you so, this whole jobs bill scam is an Axelplouffe campaign ploy, via Ed Morrissey:
Obama’s top political adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday that the administration was unwilling to break up the president’s $447 billion jobs plan if Republicans were only receptive to passing certain elements.“We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package. It’s not an a la carte menu. It’s a strategy to get this country moving,” Axelrod said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
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