The House GOP responded to Obama's jobs act speech by writing a letter asking for the text of his proposed legislation.
Two things are noteworthy here: the insistence on offsets, and the presupposition that deregulation would do more for creating jobs than unemployment expansion, payroll tax cuts, and credits for hiring the long-term unemployed and the other Obama proposals.
The letter says that Republicans "look forward" to receiving information about the offsets proposed for the jobs proposals. This highlights one of Obama's mistakes in the jobs speech and in fact throughout his administration. He has allowed the GOP to set the agenda. Even when it is obvious that the economy is stalling, he still walked the "deficit reduction" walk --including calling for changes to workers' earned benefit programs (Medicare and Social Security) in line with the GOP's four-decade campaign to decimate them as unjustifiable 'entitlements'. That permits the GOP to practice their obstructionism in two places--first, in the jobs-supporting proposals and second, in the pay-for proposals.
The letter presages that battle by noting that the House GOP wants to look back to GOP-sponsored bills that would "remove government barriers to private-sector job creation". In other words, the GOP is repeating the same worn mantra that government regulation that protects ordinary Americans from the air, water, land pollution, bad labor practices, and other anti-consumer actions of a too-powerful corporate business sector is the thing hindering job creation.
Everyone (except perhaps the low-information American voters who have been constantly misled on this issue by the corporate media) knows that isn't true. What hinders job creation is the lack of a consumer base to buy the products that would be produced by new jobs. It isn't regulation--regulation is at most a cost that limits the corporate managers' and owners' profits, since it forces business to internalize costs that it had foisted off on the public prior to the regulations. It isn't taxes--taxes are similarly just a cost of doing business. Remember that corporations have had an enormously profitable time, and they have huge warchests of cash, both abroad and at home. They have plenty of money to hire if there were only people to buy the products and services to be provided by the new hires. Until that vicious cycle is broken, stagnation will continue.
Other than its repetition of the Reaganomics anti-regulation mantra, the letter says nothing in substance. It claims to approach the Obama jobs proposals with bipartisanship and cooperation. But the years of the Obama administration have demonstrated that there is no such thing as cooperation among the current Republicans in Congress.
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