Sen. Mike Lee sees through the silliness associated with President Obama’s American Jobs Act and the accompanying plan to raise new taxes on the “rich.” He documents his concerns in a new Washington Examiner column:
Both plans are a far cry from “winning the future,” as the president claims on the campaign trail.
Like the president’s last stimulus, which cost nearly $1 trillion and failed to turn the economy around, Stimulus 2.0 assumes that massive government spending on feel-good projects (with the administration picking the economic winners and losers) will result in job creation and jolt the economy out of its doldrums. This assumption is already a proven loser.
Stimulus 1.0 ended in bad investments, massive corporate welfare, wasteful spending and more debt. What was supposed to keep unemployment below 8 percent, create millions of new jobs and hasten the economic recovery instead stands as a textbook example of the failed liberal notion that we can spend our way out of an economic hole. …
… President Obama then followed up his poor jobs plan with an equally unserious and overtly political deficit reduction proposal. It relies heavily on enormous tax increases at a time when the economy can least afford them.
Worse, Obama all but ignores entitlement spending, the greatest driver of our deficit. His plans makes no mention of Social Security — which can be made solvent for the next 75 years with just a few relatively easy adjustments — and would reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending by just 3 percent over the next decade. The president’s tax plan will allow entitlements to balloon out of control, threatening not only the solvency of those programs, but our entire economy.
Obama’s focus on small-ticket spending items, like ending subsidies for corporate jet owners, reveals he is much more concerned about election-year talking points than positive reforms to create jobs and make the economy grow.
