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.

Rep. Allen West (R-Florida): Right on Obama's Jobs Plan, Wrong on 9/11

Florida Republican Congressman Allen West appeared on Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch show on Fox Business this past Friday night to discuss the economic and financial impact on President Obama's jobs plan which he attempted to peddle to Congress on Thursday night. Of course, West condemns Obama's jobs plan (which he deserves good talking points for stating the obvious about the jobs bill on which the President wants Congress to vote), but then Napolitano shifts attention away from that topic and veers into the 9/11 remembrance issue (which is today, in fact).

West responds with his comments (which starts exactly at 4:13 in the following YouTube video.



West states, "9/11 is a historic event that we must never forget." A "historic event?" Who is he kidding? One assumes in a single breath that West is likening the 10-year-old attacks to a NASA space shuttle launch. What happened was a horrendous and atrocious tragedy that transpired ten years ago. Of course Americans are never going to "forget" what happened. That shouldn't be foolishly construed to signify that we must let it rule our lives or shape our way of life for eternity. Americans don't make a habit of recalling the brutal events that led up to and after the events of that fateful day on a daily basis. It's more or less a political talking point to fuel the War on Terror than to draw paramount lessons from a tragedy that was born out of the U.S. government's incessant interventionistic foreign and domestic policies that guided America on its imperial path for decades and after 9/11. Claims by the establishment that the federal takeover of the airports and every facet of American life has made the nation safer are apocryphal and dubious, given the unconstitutional and tyrannical abuses of the State's TSA and Homeland Security Department agents and officials. It's all a matter of public record. What will take for West and his cronies to see it?

West then continues, "You know, in this year we're gonna celebrate the tenth anniversary of 9/11." Why would any American in his or her right mind would want to "celebrate" such an awful atrocity that claimed the lives of 3,000 Americans who were killed in the crossfire because the terrorists responded to the repeated interventions of the U.S. federal government that have been the heart and soul of modern U.S. foreign policy for decades?

If we really want to pay homage to the fallen men and women in the World Trade Center towers and the planes that went down in those areas, then there's only one thing to do: end our foreign policy of intervention and replace it with one of non-intervention, bring our troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya, and spread the message of liberty and peace to those regions. End the sectarian violence, the coercion, and the corruption that have engulfed the people and their respective lands.

It's too bad the GOP and its stalwarts including West can't see that.