President Obama had assured us that if his so-called Economic Stimulus Package was passed, unemployment in this country wouldn’t go over 8%. This hugely expensive legislation was passed, and despite Obama’s assurance, unemployment in America stands at 10.2%, and most experts think it will go even higher. The stimulus package has been an unmitigated failure.
So, to get some political cover, the Obama Administration announced that it would hold a “jobs summit” at the White House next week. The Administration could save a lot of time and money by skipping the PR-stunt summit and seriously reexamine their own policies over the last year.
Their most recent effort, trying to take over healthcare in this country (Obamacare/Pelosicare) will cripple the already-under-siege small business community. Since 70% of all new jobs over the past several decades have been created by small businesses, why would you want to burden small businesses with higher healthcare costs, higher premiums, penalties, bureaucracy, paper work, etc. The answer is simple – you wouldn’t. But this job-killing behemoth-of-a-bill recently passed the House, and the Senate has now voted to open debate. If this bill becomes law, God help us, and it will smother new job-creation in the crib.
Cap and Trade (Cap and Tax) is another job-killing bill strongly supported by Obama and passed in the Pelosi House. The purpose of this terribly-flawed legislation was to tackle global warming (or the more PC term, climate change) by reducing carbon output. The problem is that China and India, two of the world’s biggest carbon emitters, have stated unequivocally that they are not going to burden their economies with this type of restrictive legislation, so the US is putting itself at a competitive disadvantage. Jobs will leave the United States and go to China and India, and since neither country has nearly the environmentally friendly record of the US, their industries will spew out far more carbon into the atmosphere than the US ever did, so global warming/climate change will probably get worse. So it’s a lose, lose, lose for the US. The American consumer pays higher prices for goods and services due to a carbon tax, we lose jobs which will flee to less restrictive India and China, and the environment will in all likelihood deteriorate since India and China’s track record on environmental issues stinks compared to the US.
One interesting sidebar on global warming. It was recently revealed that liberal scientists on the left-wing side of the global warming debate were trying to coverup data that was unfavorable to their point of view. This was virtually ignored by the mainstream media. On the other hand, when it had been alleged that the Bush Administration was trying to suppress news about global warming, it got big play in the mainstream media. Go figure.
Okay, back to examples of Obama/Pelosi job-killing legislation. Nothing kills jobs quicker than raising taxes. And raising taxes appears to be part of their DNA. Both the Senate and the House versions of the healthcare bill raise taxes big time. In the Obama/Pelosi budget passed earlier this year, the Bush tax cuts from ’01 and ’03 are being killed. This means higher capital gains taxes, higher income taxes, higher taxes when you die, and on and on. And now Democratic Congressman David Obey, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has announced that he intends to implement a “war tax.”
If you really want to encourage job creation, you don’t raise taxes, you lower them. We saw this under a Democratic Administration, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and a Republican Administration, Ronald Reagan. Both Administrations cut taxes and we had record job growth. Obama and Pelosi and Reid need to learn from history, not ignore it.
In my view, this “jobs summit” next week is nothing more than PR. We have been hemorrhaging jobs in this country for a year now. Rather than improving the environment for job creation, this Administration and Congress’s liberal, big spending policies have only made matters worse. Now, politically, they need to show that “they care.”
Don’t be fooled.
