COMMENTARY | President Barack Obama’s jobs bill speech before a joint session of Congress featured as full-throated a defense of big government as had ever echoed in the hallowed halls of the Capitol for the past few decades.
In a speech that sometimes was delivered with near hysterical shouting, Obama trotted out a laundry list of demands, tax credits, trade legislation, and infrastructure spending whose price tag totaled $450 billion, which he promised to pay for at a later date. He demanded that the bill be passed immediately.
The most interesting and bizarre part of the speech occurred in a later portion in which Obama touted big government programs as having been the source of American greatness. According to The Daily Caller:
“We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges. And leaders of both parties have followed the example he set.
“Ask yourselves – where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways and our bridges; our dams and our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance?
“How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this Chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? How many Americans would have suffered as a result?”
Just as an aside, the government did not “build the transcontinental railroad.” That was done by private business, financed with incentives from the federal government. It is also interesting to note that Obama did not mention the most popular government program of them all, the Apollo program to land a man on the Moon. Those who have observed his efforts to dismantle the space program were not surprised, however.
Obama also did not mention his own $900 billion stimulus bill or health care reform in his litany of great big government programs. Considering that the former was a failure and the latter a disaster, the omission was well-advised.
The Republican reaction to the speech has been muted but decidedly unenthusiastic. Republicans would likely support some of the tax credits and the trade legislation. The rest, including spending bills, will not be taken seriously. The previous stimulus was supposed to jump start the economy by paying union workers to build roads and bridges in “shovel-ready projects” that Obama later acknowledged were not as shovel-ready as thought.
Republicans likely do not have to go full throttle against Obama’s proposal. It is, for the most part, dead on arrival. Obama, having seen his proposal fall as flat as a wet piece of offal, will try to go to the country to try to blame the continuing economic malaise on the Republicans. He will fail in this attempt and face the prospect of attempting to gain reelection based on a proposal that has proved to be as unpopular as he is.
Source: President Obama’s Jobs Speech to Congress, Daily Caller, Sept. 8, 2011