President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.
It will only be paid for if a committee he can’t control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future – the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals – don’t roll it back.
Underscoring the gravity of the nation’s high employment rate, Obama chose a joint session of Congress, normally reserved for a state of the union speech, to lay out his proposals. But if the moment was extraordinary, the plan he presented was conventional Washington rhetoric in one respect: It employs sleight-of-hand accounting.
A look at some of Obama’s claims and how they compare with the facts:
OBAMA: “Everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything.”
THE FACTS: Obama did not spell out exactly how he would pay for the measures contained in his nearly $450 billion American Jobs Act, but said he would send his proposed specifics in a week to the new congressional supercommittee charged with finding budget savings. White House aides suggested that new deficit spending in the near-term to try to promote job creation would be paid for in the future – the “out years,” in legislative jargon – but they did not specify what would be cut or what revenues they would use.
Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due. Today’s Congress cannot bind a later one for future spending. A future Congress could simply reverse it.
Currently, roughly all federal taxes and other revenues are consumed in spending on various federal benefit programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, farm subsidies and other social-assistance programs and payments on the national debt. Pretty much everything else is done on credit with borrowed money.
So there is no guarantee that programs that clearly will increase annual deficits in the near term will be paid for in the long term.
I counted at least 6 straw man arguments in Obama’s speech yesterday.
And those were just as I’m sitting listening, not while reading the transcript.
One straw man was that if Congress doesn’t do it ”my way,” and pass this whole bill, they are a do-nothing Congress (shades of Truman!).
Well, as the smoke clears and we get to reading the dirty details today, it seems more like Obama is really Wimpy, wanting that hamburger today but paying for it later.
This jobs plan is an IOU from Obama.
“It will not add to the deficit,” Obama claimed.
But that cannot be true.
(Unless we parse the term ”deficit” in some weird way.)
Deficits are calculated for individual years.
Maybe Obama meant to say that, in the long run, his hoped-for programs would not further increase the national debt, not a particular annual deficit.
Another straw man was this whole ”infrastructure bank.”
It is in Obama’s American Jobs Act.
We already have ~50 existing state infrastructure banks.
But Obama claimed if Republicans didn’t pass this they didn’t care about Americans who need jobs right now.
One major problem.
Setting up a NEW, National Infrastructure Bank would waste 2 years during which unemployed people will not be helped.
Who’s the straw man?
Obama is so made of straw we should call him the scarecrow.
A complete waste of time, money and resources..Smile America..reid, the douche bag and idiot biden screwed you again. When will you ever learn..Nero burnt Rome for a reason..you need to read more..Oh! it is better in Homeric Greek and Latin than it is in english. Need to learn a second, third or fourth language…
As usual Obama passed the buck to make someone else responsible for figuring out how to pay for his spending. Typical socialist politician, making expensive promises to gain votes without doing the hard work of figuring out how to pay for his vote buying.