George Rebane
The President’s much trumpeted jobs plan speech came off tonight. The man has found a new voice that I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot between now and November 2012 – it’s his Right Now! voice that has a new sense of urgency delivered in a brand new timbre.
He laid out a lot of points to get us working fixing infrastructure, giving small businesses payroll tax breaks, and presenting his plan for paying for it all. For those who didn’t watch the speech, I advise clearing your throat and blowing all the loose boogers out of your nose, else you’ll get it all over your shirt.
Without so much as a blink, Fearless said that the added $447B of this latest stimulus (not the word he used) will be paid for by adding it on to the current $1.2T of spending cuts that Congress doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of agreeing on. You heard right, ‘Since they’re already working on a lot of spending cuts and new revenues, I’m just gonna add a bit to that pile. And voila! it’s gonna be taken care of – what’s your next question?’
In Democratic circles that’s known as a plan, and, you know, they’re right that the Repubs haven’t been able to offer an equivalent plan like that since he’s been president. (Now go clean up your shirt.)
President Obama also went down history lane and reminded us that the feds have always had a role in investing in and building critical national infrastructure, so this is nothing but just another march we should take right now! down that well-worn policy roadway. Didn’t the federal government come up with and invest in the trans-national railroad and land-grant colleges?
Well no. The college idea came from a college and businesses, and the railroad idea came from greedy investors. As for funding the whole thing, it didn’t cost the federal government one red cent because it gave away something that in those days it had more of than it knew what to do with – land, lots of land.
So the colleges were built by funds obtained from the sale of government land grants, and the greedies started railroad companies that were granted lots of literally worthless land along their rights of way that subsequently became valuable when they finished putting in the tracks. All both enterprises wanted, after the deals were struck, was for the feds to get out of the way. But our Organizer in Chief spun it as if you didn’t know any history – you could just see ol’ Honest Abe shaking his worried head and writing those big stimulus checks out of the Treasury.
There was more to the kick-off speech for the Obama 2012 campaign, but you get the drift. OK, I’ll just share one more little awkward piece. Obama challenged that ‘Some may think that all government needs to do is just lower taxes and reduce regulations to get the economy going, but …’. The remainder of that little piece of Keynesian wisdom was drowned out by loud applause and cheering from the Republican side of the packed House chamber.
[update] Well, it turns out that bankrupt Solyndra will be creating some more green jobs after all (see picture). Only these will be at the FBI, Dept of Justice, and diverse law firms in California. But hey, it’s solar energy and the $527M loaned them by the government was commonly known as ‘the long green’. And here I’ve been a Doubting Thomas about all this. This is part and parcel of all the wonderful work that CARB implementing AB32 has done for California.
Actually Russ Steele broke this latest scandal locally here. The WSJ just published ‘FBI Raids Solar-Panel Maker’ which added to the report that Solyndra executives have been in the West Wing over the last year or so almost as many times as AFL-CIO’s Trumka. And to add insult to injury, Solyndra’s CEO Harrison just two months ago assured Rep Henry Waxman (D, CA) that all was going well and the company was financially secure. He couldn’t have BSed a nicer guy.
If it wasn’t for our money going down the drain, it sure would be fun watching the socialists continue to circumvent the markets by stimulating this and stimulating that. And as we’ll no doubt find out when the investigation broadens, President Obama’s prescient statement that Solyndra was a “testament to American ingenuity and dynamism.” will turn out true beyond his wildest expectations. At least for getting stuck with the bill, we are all going to have an entertaining election season.
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