Republicans to the White House: Hey, not all of the president's "new" proposals are dreadful, so we'd like to play ball on some of them. Cool? The White House to Republicans: Pound salt, you uncompromising, unpatriotic SOB's. Welcome to compromise, Obama campaign style:
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. "The president has a package; the package works together. We need to do many things to get this economy moving," Axelrod said.
By the way, how much would this non-negotiable jobs package cost per job "saved or created," based on the most optimistic of projections? Zero Hedge runs the numbers and reaches an astonishing verdict:
The overall AJA plan will cost $250,000 per job created (excluding the interest expense) and $312,500 per union job, er job created (including interest).
Let me amend something I just wrote. These numbers are not especially astonishing. Simulus 1.0 spent hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars on an economic policy that failed, according to its own benchmarks. Even if you accept the White House's crazy-sunny Recovery Act statistics on job savings/creation, each job cost taxpayers nearly $300,000. The true Stimulus 1.0 employment numbers -- based on ground-level findings, not theoretical multipliers -- is much bleaker. Asked about last night's GOP debate, Axe patronizingly regurgitates classic leftist thinking on how jobs are created:
"What voters learned was that they — really none of them had much to say about how they were going to create jobs now, how they were going to build an economy that works," said Axelrod. “The president has a specific plan that would put teachers back in the classroom, put construction workers back at rebuilding bridges roads, that would put veterans back to work. There was nothing like that last night," he said about the GOP debate.
Actually, most of the Republican candidates spoke extensively about job growth. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman outlined their specific plans, Herman Cain discussed how he created jobs in the private sector, and Rick Perry spoke of lifting onerous regulation and frivolous litigation off of job creators' backs. Newt Gingrich summarized: "The American people create jobs, not government." But in Axelrod's (ie, Obama's) world the only worthy jobs proposals require huge outputs of ineffective and inefficient (see above) federal spending, funded by increased borrowing and previously rejected forms of higher taxation.
