Part B is for the federal government to bribe small businesses, with their own money, to hire additional workers. He proposes giving businesses $4,000 for each new worker, providing that worker has been unemployed for at least six months. But then he wants to raise taxes on those same people to pay for it. Those “millionaires and billionaires”, that the President wants to pay “their fair share”? The group his plan target actually make as little as $200,000 per year and are heavily comprised of small business owners.
This is not a jobs program. What we have here is a reelection speech, pushing class warfare, and relying on the ignorance of the American public to give him four more years to take us irretrievably down the road to Euro-Socialism. (Ask Greece how that is working out) But America is not nearly that stupid, as evidenced by every poll that is taken lately. With that said; here are my thoughts for what the President should do if he really wants to create more jobs.
I call this The Addition by Subtraction Plan.
The environmental dangers are severely overblown. The big BP oil spill, that dumped millions of barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, has had almost no lasting effect, and you have go looking for what little there is. I was in New Orleans this past spring, and the talk of disaster was not about BP last year, but of Katrina, six years ago.
The biggest obstacle to more drilling is not money, technology, or even where to drill. It’s President Obama and the man implementing his no-oil-drilling policy, Ken Salazar. Here are a few examples
In February 2009, Salazar pulled leases with oil companies on 77 parcels, covering about 130,000 acres in Utah. This was after they had already gone through a vigorous seven year application process, were approved, and paid 7 million dollars for the leases. No jobs created there, no matter how hard oil companies tried.
In May 2010, in response to the BP oil spill of the coast of Louisiana, Ken Salazar issued a blanket moratorium banning all off shore drilling. That ban was overturned by a Federal judge who ruled that there was no evidence the other oil companies had done anything wrong, and should not be penalized. Ignoring the judges ruling, Salazar issued a new ban two months later, and to date not a single permit has been issued. In the meantime; owners of those off-shore rigs moved their jobs to other countries to drill there.
Not being finished Ken Salazar, just weeks later, had the Bureau of Land Management “reinterpret” the 2005 Energy Policy Act and issue new rules that slowed and restricted the issuance of drilling permits in the western United States. The Department of the Interior was sued in federal court and won, but that is immaterial to those who were out of work at the time.
Ken Salazar has a waged a 2 ½ year battle with oil companies whose only sin is to be in a business hated by Democrats. These rulings and policies are costing the economy thousands and thousands of jobs. Sending Ken Salazar back to rural Colorado would be a good start to fixing that.
http://www.westerncaucus.pearce.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=74&parentid=1§iontree=&itemid=133
Fire National Labor Relations Board Chairman Mark Pearse. In April of this year the NLRB, headed by Mark Pearse, issued a ruling that Boeing Aircraft violated federal laws by having the audacity to create non-union jobs in South Carolina, instead of union jobs in Washington state. That was not the actual reasoning, but that is exactly what it boils down to. http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/04/20/1634171/ruling-boeings-south-carolina.html
The actual ruling was that the opening of this plant was in retaliation for the strikes of the machinist union in the past. Opening a plant elsewhere could be equivalent to closing the union plant in response to the strikes, which is illegal. That’s just crap. No Washington state jobs have been lost, and only new jobs have been created. This is nothing but the Obama administration paying back the unions for the millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
Mark Pearse and the NLRB are telling Boeing where they can open a new plant, and for strictly political reasons. Forget for a moment that it is completely illegal. It will stifle job creation. It takes capital to expand a business. By increasing the amount of capital, in the form of labor costs, that a business is forced to pay to expand, you will get less expansion, and less jobs. Why is it, you think, that so many jobs are going overseas? The labor is cheaper. The NLRB wants to make all new jobs, expensive, but not more productive, union jobs. As a result businesses will expand less or do it in another, cheaper county, not just another state.
Showing Mark Pearse, (plus fellow ex union-lawyer and current NLRB member, Craig Becker), the door, would do wonders to alleviate the fears of all businesses that not only would these practices not be tolerated, but also that legislation like Card Check is not in the cards.
Fire Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Ok, as a matter of law you can’t fire a United States Senator. Getting rid of one is hard than getting rid of crabgrass. Unless, as the saying goes you “find them in bed with a dead hooker or a live boy” you have to wait 6 years until the voters of a given state, to send them to the taxpayer funded bread line. Why pick on poor Ben? Because Senator Nelson is symbolic of everything that was wrong with the process in which ObamaCare was shoved down the throats of a majority of Americans.
In order to sway fence sitting Democrat Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and the aforementioned Ben Nelson of Nebraska, amendments were added to The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) exempting the state of Nebraska from the new ObamaCare expanded costs of Medicaid, and forcing the other 49 states to pony up 45 million to cover the first ten years of those new costs. I should have said the other 48 states, because Louisiana got between 100-300 million to offset Medicaid expenses as well. Her vote moved to the Yes column shortly thereafter. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6006838-503544.html
The “Cornhusker Kickback” and second “Louisiana Purchase” were the most obvious examples of vote buying for a bill that the majority of Americans polled didn’t want and is killing jobs right now.
The new law says that companies with more than 50 employees must provide insurance to their employees that, covers “children” to age 26. This one provision alone is expensive for the insurance companies. They raises their rates, which ultimately comes out of your paycheck. If I am a company with 50 employees what hurry am I in to hire the next guy, and increase my costs? Those with more than 50 employees saw their premiums rise when it came time to renew their policies at the end of fiscal 2010.
And that is just the part that is clear. This abomination exceeded 2700 pages of legalese. Businesses have no idea what will be considered “good” insurance under this law. So to be safe, they are not hiring any new people, less they be exposed to more liability.
In January 2009, the same month Barack Obama took his oath, new job creation hit it’s low mark when the country was losing 750,000 jobs a month. In that first year of office Obama and his democratically controlled Congress did a lot of nothing, passing no major legislation. But that was a good thing and the situation was improving. By the winter of 2009 the economy had stopped losing jobs and began to actually generate them. By April of 2010 the economy was adding over 225,000 jobs a month. In March 2010 ObamaCare passed and job creation dropped. Since then we have been gaining on average 6500 jobs per month over the prior month. The recovery from Jan 2009 to April 2010 had seen 67,000 more jobs produced, on average, than the month before. That’s a 90% drop.
The US Chamber of Commerce took a survey in July 2011 and a full third of them site ObamaCare as their greatest or second greatest reason for not hiring. In November 2010 the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank issued a statement that said, in part, that
“In addition to slow and uncertain revenue growth, contacts in this recovery are frequently citing a number of other factors that are impeding hiring. Prominent among these is the lack of clarity about the cost implications of the recent health care legislation. We’ve frequently heard strong comments to the effect of “my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.”
Fire Ben Nelson, repeal ObamaCare, and then make constructive reform in our healthcare system (you can start by lifting the asinine state requirements of what insurance companies must cover, and let the people themselves decide what they need in a health insurance policy) and jobs will flow.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/07/Economic-Recovery-Stalled-After-Obamacare-Passed
Fire Environmental Protective Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson. On April 17, 2009 http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/17/epa-carbon-dioxide-business-energy-epa.html
The EPA ruled that carbon dioxide, a gas essential to life on planet Earth, is a pollutant, and thus subject to EPA rules, regulations, restrictions, and limits. So anything that emits CO2, like say the internal combustion engine, will be subject to the whims of the EPA. That won’t add any costs to doing business, now will it? Let’s muse that the EPA says emissions have to be cut by hypothetically 25% on your business vehicles, what do you do? Spend gobs of money replacing or retrofitting to stay open, or hire new people? What you say? The EPA would only go after those rich oil companies or nasty coal-fired power plants. I am sure those oil companies and power plants will just eat the cost of any equipment upgrades or replacements and won’t pass them along in the form of higher prices to those (read: everyone) who uses their products.
And all of this CO2 reduction nonsense comes out of the global warming hysteria. Check that; the MAN-caused global warming hysteria. There is no proof that the earth is warming up, much less that it is man caused. The computer projections coming out of the United Nations and East Anglia University have failed to predict what has actually happened, let alone what will happen. East Anglia University has been rocked by scandals indicating they covered up data that was detrimental to their global warming theory and cherry picked data that supported it. Kathy Sabine on Channel 9 doesn’t even try to predict the weather more than a few days in advance, and these guys are sure they have it nailed in the coming decades?
We are talking trillions of dollars, not just world-wide, but here in the US if we try to reduce CO2 emissions. The equation is simple. Less CO2 emissions equals less energy. Less energy equals fewer jobs. Fire Lisa Jackson and give American businesses one less thing to worry about.
Will Barack Obama do these things? Doubtful. He did recently approve the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would ultimately run from Canada to Texas. It will create 1000s of jobs, but his environmental constituents are beside themselves. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/campaign-blog/shining-light-on-obamas-tar-sands-pipeline-de/blog/36542/
It’s a good start, and I anxiously watch what he does. But, I think the better bet is that he will continue to give speeches and convince America that more taxes equals more jobs.
So finally, fire Barack Obama in November 2012 and replace him with someone who will do these things, and more. Here’s a hint. He will have an “R” beside his name.