OPINION:
President Obama is taking a mulligan after the Democratic-controlled Senate decided not to pass his American Jobs Act last week. The commander in chief hit the campaign trail Monday in his taxpayer-funded luxury bus to drum up support for what he thinks will be a more palatable package.
From Asheville, N.C., Mr. Obama mocked congressional Republicans, saying, “Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole all at once. So we’re going to break it up into bite-size pieces.”
The first morsel goes to bail out big-city mayors and state governors who created unsustainably lavish compensation packages for public-sector employees, including teachers, firefighters and police. He said the next vote should be on “putting construction workers back to work” - under pro-union Davis-Bacon rules, of course. He then wants more money for unemployment benefits.
Nowhere in this new strategy does he call for spending stimulus funds to pay for any nonunion, private-sector jobs. He does, however, call for paying for the new spending with a tax hike on job creators and investors.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he plans to put one of the small-bites jobs bills on the floor every week. He started by introducing legislation that spends $30 billion subsidizing 400,000 jobs in the educational bureaucracy.
The Nevada Democrat said he would pay for this new spending by raising taxes by .5 percent on those with a combined income over $1 million. According to the Treasury Department, 4 out of 5 filers in this category are business owners. So the liberals’ economic plan is to somehow get people back to work by taking money away from job creators and investors and dumping it in government coffers.
This ought to sound familiar. In February 2009, Mr. Obama promised the nearly trillion dollars in his first stimulus bill would “prevent our states and local communities from laying off firefighters and teachers and police.” In August 2010, the Democratic Congress and president approved a $26 billion bailout of states for these same public-union jobs.
When asked why the stimulus bill and the special-interest handout weren’t enough to keep these bloated salaries paid, Mr. Reid said the money had run out. Mr. Reid then blamed Republicans. “When your only goal is to follow your leader and that leader, my friend Mitch McConnell, his goal is to defeat Obama. Of course they don’t want to do anything that’s constructive,” Mr. Reid said on a conference call with reporters.
Mr. Obama and his congressional henchmen talk about teachers and firefighters, but they are really just using taxpayer money to buy union votes for 2012. America doesn’t need more fraudulent stimulus bills to dish out more politically motivated spending. Republicans should block the piecemeal jobs bills in the Senate and not even waste time bringing them up for a vote in the House.
Emily Miller is a senior editor for the Opinion pages at The Washington Times.
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