Lead, follow or get out of the way

The private sector continues to add jobs, thanks in large part to President Obama’s Recovery Act, this month gaining more than 67,000 jobs. We’re still making progress, but we’ve got a long way to go before we can make up for the 750,000 jobs per month we were hemorrhaging under the Bush Administration.

Here’s a handy visual:

And once again, Republicans in Congress are dead set on scoring cheap political points instead of helping out America’s small businesses and their employees.

Case and point: the Small Business Jobs Bill would have provided  $12 billion in tax breaks for small businesses and would expand the availability of loans through the Small Business Administration loan program.  What did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell think of helping our small businesses create jobs? He called it  “a little itty-bitty bill” and every Republican but two in the Senate voted against it. I guess since the bill didn’t ship thousands of American jobs overseas or give massive tax breaks to the wealthy, Senate Republicans just couldn’t find the temerity to support it.

Then there’s John Boehner, who unveiled his jobs and economic “plan” last week in a speech so riddled with falsehoods, revisionist history and failed ideas, it really gives Paul Ryan’s Roadmap a contender for Worst Republican Plan Yet. Boehner’s plan in a nutshell? Let’s go back to the same disastrous policies that led to America losing over 8 million jobs. Pardon me if I’m not excited at that prospect. 

And how would Boehner take us there? Well, of course Boehner wants to keep the gigantic loophole in the current corporate tax system that allows multinational corporations to get tax credits for taxes they don’t even pay. Boehner also claimed that allowing the disastrous Bush Tax Cuts, which would give an average tax cut of $100,000 to each household making more than $1 million, is somehow going to prevent job creation, when the CBO has clearly shown that a tax cut for the top two percent is the LEAST effective way to stimulate the economy. Darn facts and their ‘liberal bias.’

Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised Boehner has such disdain for this administration’s efforts to create jobs – he attacked the jobs bill signed by the President last month that saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of firefighters, police officers and teachers, deriding them as “government jobs” and “special interests.”
 
Finally, in what’s becoming the singe largest group amnesia event in recent history, Boehner and his Republican colleagues continue to attack about the size of the deficit. Fact: Republican leadership under George Bush took a record $237 billion surplus and turned it into a record $1.3 trillion deficit in eight short years. Remember when Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter?” Yeah, neither do any Republicans. They didn’t care about deficits while jamming through the behemoth $8 trillion unfunded mandate that was Medicare Part-D, or the largest transfer of wealth in the history of western civilization, the Bush Tax Cuts, also paid for with deficit spending. Or the two wars that were never on the budget.  So when the Republican’s all had their ‘come to Jesus’ moment on January 20, 2009, didn’t the timing strike anyone else as rather suspect?

The fact is President Obama’s policies pulled the economy back from the GWB cliff. The Recovery Act is working — last quarter alone, the Recovery Act created almost 4 million jobs. President Obama is leading, and the American people are ready to follow and support his efforts to help our small businesses. The Republicans just have to get the hell out of the way.