The President's Job Speech

Missed the President's speech last night due to black out conditions in San Diego. But all reports indicate that I wouldn't have been surprised. I was just starting a post before the speech to declare it a failure ahead of time, but fate intervened. Anyway, listening to Mark Steyn substituting for Rush this morning and reading some of the reports, I am left with just a few points.

• Where's the bill? The President, as usual, did no heavy lifting. He demanded that Congress take action, but where is the bill he proposes? Legislation usually requires, well, legislation, as in legal prose.
• Where's the money? Are we really proposing to add almost a half trillion in new debt? The AP fisked the speech moments after it was given: It will only be paid for if a committee he can't control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future -- the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals -- don't roll it back. . . .Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due.
• Everything is temporary. Temporary tax credits and temporary tax cuts do nothing to encourage new hiring.
  
• Roads and bridges? Really? This worked so well in the first stimulus package. Good luck getting the projects past the increasingly zealous EPA.
• Congress gets the blame for the lack of jobs? Whose party decided that healthcare was more important for the first two years of the administration. Nice tone. Way to encourage Republicans to work with you. Bottom line this was a campaign speech. Now we know Obama's campaign game plan, blame the Republicans.

My sympathies go out to the Republicans who sat through the speech. Like Job, they found that you needn't necessarily sin to be punished.

Presidential Temperament?

Yes.

No.

The big headline on the Drudgereport is that the President walked out of a meeting with Eric Cantor regarding debt limit negotiations. The President is wrapping himself in the flag, claiming that the Republicans are refusing to compromise. Nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans are willing to increase the debt limit by the exact amount of spending cuts that the President and the Democrats are willing to cut spending by. Seems reasonable to me. From Politico:

Obama told Cantor that he would either have to agree to tax increases or give up on his demand that the debt hike be matched dollar-to-dollar to the cuts — that is, $2.5 trillion in deficit-reduction over 10 years in exchange for a $2.5 trillion hike in the debt ceiling.

Problem is, the GOP’s vowed not to raise the debt ceiling by more than the amount in total cuts and a $1.5 trillion debt-ceiling hike won’t get us past the election next year. That makes The Perpetual Campaigner unhappy, so either the GOP will have to step back from its vow or O will have to agree to deal with the debt ceiling again — just a few months before election day, when the incentives on both sides to hold out will be even greater than they are now.

So despite the President's rhetoric that he will sacrifice his presidency over this, one can only hope, the real issue is that he doesn't want this as a campaign issue in 2012, so he won't go for any deal that doesn't push the next debt ceiling debate beyond November, 2012, with cushion to spare. It has been widely reported that Obama said that "Ronald Reagan wouldn't sit here and take this." How true; in the 1980s, Reagan reached out to Dan Rostenkowski to cut deals on tax code simplification and rate reductions that led to real growth in the economy. He didn't sit back and wait to the eleventh hour to jump into the fray with politically charged rhetoric designed to deflect criticism. William Daley, an old Chicago pol, who probably knew Rosty, should get Obama to refrain from comparing himself to Reagan, its too easy a target.

Obama was elected in no small part because of his supposed bipartisan tone suggested a willingness to independents that he would work in good faith with Republicans on pressing issues in trying times. He has certainly lost whatever good will he may have had by his consistently nasty tone, whether towards the opposition or the "fat cats with corporate jets." As Lexington points out in The Economist:

Why is bashing the rich such an unpopular form of populism in America? The normal answer falls back on culture. Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution notes that Americans are repelled by the notion of inequality in worth or status. That men are created equal is, after all, “self-evident”. They are, however, far less perturbed by unequal wealth, a form of inequality that is the inevitable product of the free-market system in which most still profess an abiding faith.

Obama has shown himself to be a captive to his left wing base on issues where it was most important for him to be open to negotiation. How a man could ignore the base and his campaign promises regarding overseas wars, but never cross them on anything domestic, at first boggles the imagination. But then consider this, Obama never actually does anything which reduces the size of the government, not even something like cutting military spending.

Programming note. Sorry for the dearth of posts lately, continued health problems are slowing me down.

Weak Jobs - Obama Blames Republicans

Not the certainty we hoped for, not the change in unemployment we expected.

Except that it was true to form, I could barely believe that the President had this to say in response to miserable jobs news.

"The sooner we get this done [a deal on the debt ceiling], the sooner that the markets know that the debt limit ceiling will have been raised and that we have a serious plan to deal with our debt and deficit, the sooner that we give our businesses the certainty that will need in order to make additional investments to grow and hire,"

I am again astounded by the President's inability to grasp economics. For the past two and a half years, businesses have been worried that a debt ceiling deal wouldn't be reached in mid-2011, therefore they haven't been hiring and prolonged the recession? No, Mr. President the certainty they need is that your spending binge won't require the Fed to inflate the money supply. The certainty they need is to know how they can provide health insurance without running afoul of your amazingly complex Obamacare act. The certainty they need is that the EPA, the DOJ, the NLRB or some other agency of your administration won't declare unlawful, previously normal business practices. The certainty they need is what their long term tax structure will look like, since you keep preventing a permanent deal on taxes. The certainty they need is that the government won't keep intervening in one sector of the economy after another, autos, housing, and banking to name a few prolonging the pain of recession by refusing to let market forces re-balance resources. The certainty they need is that the government of the United States will keep its debt at a level that it can be repaid and not go the way of Greece or some banana republic. Mr. President, the certainty they need is that you won't be re-elected in 2012.

Of Course They're Not Cooperating (on Immigration Reform)

President Obama meets with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at the White House on June 29.
Photo courtesy CNN.

Obama is blaming Republicans in talks before Latino groups on the lack of progress on immigration reform. Setting aside that he has had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate most of his term, and a very large majority in the House, why do we think this is? Because the so called "reform" he is offering is a charade. Let me be clear; I too, favor comprehensive reform, but only after the politicians secure the border and only if there is no path to citizenship for those who entered the country illegally, they should never be allowed to vote. First let's hear what Obama is proposing from a CBS News article:

Mr. Obama advocated a comprehensive approach that would insist the government, businesses and illegal immigrants themselves live up to their responsibilities within the law. Focusing on a "border security first" approach would fail, he said, because the system is too big to be fixed "only with fences and border patrols."

Obama also wants to create a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States; critics call that amnesty, which Obama denies because he would ensure that immigrants must first acknowledge that they had broken the law, pay fines and back taxes, perform community service and learn English.

The public has been burned by this before. We don't want the stinking empty promises that we will fix the border only after we have "comprehensive reform," to include amnesty. We have been lied to enough on this subject.

Once we secure the border and we are happy with the security, I am perfectly willing to talk about massive expansion in guest worker programs, a path to normalcy (not citizenship) for those here illegally, a sub-minimum wage for guest workers and many other topics. BTW, Obamacare has really poisoned the well on this discussion, because another demand should be that those who came here illegally be ineligible for any federal subsidies for health care.

Bottom line: No immigration reform without enforcing the border first, that's it, that's final, we're not negotiating.