It’s a real jobs plan, one meant to stimulate the economy and get people back to work, unlike Obama’s one which was a campaign platform that had so many poison pills that even his own party couldn’t pass it in the Democrat controlled Senate
(The Politico) President Barack Obama had his American Jobs Act. Now, Senate Republicans may have their Real American Jobs Act.
After more than two years in which the GOP political strategy to Obama’s policies has revolved around the word “no,†Republicans, who are growing increasingly confident they will win back the Senate in next year’s elections, want to give voters a sense of how they’d attempt to turn around the struggling economy if they were in power.
And regaining the Senate is just as important, if not more important, than regaining the White House. Without control of the Senate, a the GOP will not be able to enact their agenda even if they control the House and White House. Don’t forget about electing Republican Senators.
So they’re planning to roll out a jobs plan that amounts to a conservative’s dream agenda: targeting labor and environmental regulations, enacting a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, lowering corporate and individual tax rates, encouraging energy production and expanding free trade, according to a draft obtained by POLITICO.
Sounds a lot better than dumping more money into failed “green” energy companies, short term road projects that see people laid off afterwards, and turtle tunnels.
A draft of the plan refers to it as the “Real American Jobs Act,†a not-so subtle riff on Obama’s $447 billion bill that was defeated by a GOP-led filibuster on Tuesday and would have pumped billions into infrastructure and school construction, cut payroll taxes, give tax incentives to companies hiring laid-off workers and provide aid to ailing states.
Gotta love the name. You also have to love that Obama thinks that most people are blue collar workers involved with the construction industry, and would be financed by the “other” America, those rich people who own all the construction companies. That’s the problem when every thought is about class warfare: Obama forgets that some people have jobs other than paving roads and painting bridges.
Under spending reform, Republicans call for the balanced-budget amendment as well as a bipartisan proposal to give the president line-item-veto authority. On tax reform, the senators call for reducing individual and corporate income tax rates to 25 percent.
On regulatory reform, Republicans will propose repealing the health care and financial reform laws and try to limit medical malpractice lawsuits. Any rule that would cost the economy more than $100 million would have to be approved by a joint resolution of Congress. In a shot at the president, no federal agency could issue regulations until the unemployment rate drops to 7.7 percent, the level in January 2009 when Obama took office.
It would target expensive mandates on states, whack an air-pollution rule that the GOP said would affect “farm dust†and overhaul the National Labor Relations Board. Offshore energy production would be ramped up by prodding the Interior Department to take action and coal mining permitting would be sped up.
Excellent ideas. I hope there are some serious ideas about reducing spending in the plan. We’ll see, perhaps today, when it is unveiled.
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