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Friday, September 16, 2011

Obama's Precious Jobs Program

President Obama came off seriously resolute when he told members of Congress to pass his jobs bill immediately. (A transcript of his political speech is provided here.) The move was a ploy to buy votes and shore up political support for his re-election campaign, which has already swung into full gear. But then nothing what he says ought to shock anyone. It doesn't for me, at least.

Here are the videos of his speech before the entire body:

Part 1


Part 2


and Part 3


And what is so special about his precious jobs program that he wants imposed upon the populace by federal edict? Nothing...that is, if you haven't drunk the statist Kool-Aid and bought into his pie-in-the-sky rhetoric that it will "create" jobs and "boost" the economy.

Here's the warped logic of his plan: he claims that his purported $447 billion package will "grow the economy" if Congress acts to pass it "right away." (Notice that he echoed those words 18 times in a row.) But that's not all of it.

According to him, the bill is laden with payroll "tax cuts" that will bring us out of the recession and boost the economy. (I put the pluralized term tax cuts in quotation marks because of the dubious, suspicious, and fallacious claim of his statements.) When one views cuts in payroll taxes, one sees that the cuts gut the Medicare and Social Security taxes that make up the FICA tax. However, one must recognize that those taxes fund both Medicare and Social Security. Both programs are running colossal deficits and creating cost overruns that threaten their very existence. That simply means that they are generating less revenue than they require to issue their payouts to retirees (who are supposed to be the intended recipients of those funds). That also means that more of the funds that haven't been touched yet and are withheld in the Treasury will have to be cashed in at some point.

The news gets worse than that. I should note that the Treasury is already plagued with a $1 trillion-plus deficit. That means more money will be extracted from the already-weakened, highly-regulated productive private sector to reimburse the Social Security and Medicare monies. That will be so unless the President chooses to radically alter the tax code to make up the lost difference. But it will not be so. The money will be coercively taken out of private capital markets in the economy and shifted right back into those sectors in the appearance of higher taxes under the guise of a payroll tax cut. In Obama's Bizarro World, that's expected to boost the economy.

The plan unsurprisingly subsidizes small firms in the form of a doled-out $4,000 tax credit as a condition to hire more employees who have been out of work for six months or more than it would otherwise. This is giving employers an incentive not to hire workers because of the additional costs that this requirement would impose on businesses, considering this is not done in real demand but on political gimmicks and musical chairs. It sounds great to hire employees with this tax credit, but with other regulatory, tax, and other expenisve burdens imposed on businesses, this is, as I have stated before, just merely window dressing to shore up political votes for his re-election.

This is the liberaltard logic to which we are all subjected. My head won't stop spinning right now.

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