The Popular Press is swooning over what they consider to be the new-found potency in President Barack Obama's demands that the Congress pass his Jobs Bill.
For reasons which I cannot understand, the President decided to make his case for his bill by leading with who was going to pay for it, notwithstanding we have no idea how the first job will be created by the jillions of dollars of new taxes he is proposing.
You want people who make millions of dollars a year to pay more in taxes? Ok. I don't have an answer to that.
But somehow, in the translation, anyone with a family income north of about $250,000 (husband and wife each making a little over $10 k per month) becomes the equal of Warren Buffett's income and needs to be penalized for the family's success.
Hello?
Here's what I would have done, had I owned the world:
I would have made the Republicans and the Democrats in the House and Senate sit in the House Chamber (the Senate isn't big enough) and I would have had House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put before the joint session one idea to create jobs after another.
If the assembled geniuses said idea "A" was workable, that would have been put on a table. If idea "B" was good, it would have been put atop idea "A." If idea "C" didn't get a majority of votes it would have been put in a different pile.
Every idea to create jobs would have gotten fair hearing and a vote and at the end of the session there would be a pile of "good" jobs ideas and a pile of "bad" jobs ideas.
THEN they could have begun the process of figuring out how to pay for the ideas they had already agreed were "good."
Instead the President led with tax increases (which were denied him last December during the lame duck session) to pay for programs which do not yet exist to create jobs which are not yet available.
Here's a good idea. When you want to solve a problem, start with solving the problem.
If Al Gore had not been the self-absorbed doofus he has always been, he would have started the whole Global-Warming/Climate Change discussion by asking:
"Who thinks putting less crap into the atmosphere is better than putting more crap into the atmosphere?"
I agree with that. If there is "global warming," I don't care whether it is caused by cows letting gas, or the Earth's orbit getting closer to the Sun, or the Sun going through some intestinal issues similar to terrestrial cows.
But, Nooooo. Either you buy into Gore's version of the universe or he calls you an eco-terrorist. And he calls you that from his private jet which will be taxed more by Obama which will … create jobs.
If the discussion had been centered around "how about we have our kids breath cleaner air" rather than all this scientific point-counterpoint we would be much farther along on the less crap in the atmosphere front.
We cannot continue an economy which has more than 14 million people unemployed; and, four million more under-employed.
Nearly half of all Black teenagers are without jobs with nothing to occupy them during the day.
How long do you think it will be before some charlatan claims they are being kept from the American Dream by "the Man" and someone sets a car on fire in Washington, DC, or New York, or LA, or Detroit?
Ever hear of the Arab Spring? It started with one young man setting himself on fire in a small city in Tunisia.
President Obama is hell-bent on re-litigating the fight he lost on taxes 10 months ago because his political advisors and the pollsters have told him he looks like a pansy.
The unemployment rate is 9.1 percent. Nothing he can do will get it down to the magic 7.2 percent by Election Day next November - which was the rate when Ronald Reagan got re-elected in 1984.
FDR got re-elected with a higher unemployment rate but it took sending about 13 million men and women into the military where a private made about $70 per month and was no longer in the civilian job market.
Over one million Americans were killed or wounded in the process.
Short of starting World War III, Obama needs to come up with some ideas for creating jobs; not just come up with more ideas for taxing the rich.
Class warfare isn't going to get it done.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member