Community Commentary: Plenty of problems with Obama’s jobs bill

Recent letter writers Samantha O’Dell, Baldwin Cline and Violet Larsen want Pilotland readers to contact their legislators and loudly advocate for the passage of President Obama’s American Jobs Act.

They think it’s a good idea for our country to borrow another one-half trillion dollars from the Chinese to try again to create some jobs in advance of the 2012 general election. And Obama says it will be “paid for.” He wouldn’t mislead us, would he? So what’s the problem?

Quite a lot, actually. First, the jobs bill is a mirror image of the more than $800 billion ’09 Stimulus Program, which created somewhere between zero and not very many permanent jobs. With our nation nearly $15 trillion in debt, adding another $447 billion in indebtedness without a guaranteed positive result doesn’t make much sense to me. Remember, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Second, it relies on gouging the so-called “rich” to pay for it. According to Obama, the rich are those “millionaires and billionaires” who make $200,000 a year individually or $250,000 as a couple. More than 70% in this category own and operate small businesses. They are the employers of nearly two-thirds of all American workers and constitute the engine of our economy. Confiscating more money from the productive would reduce funds available to them to start companies or build plants or invest in job creation. It must be remembered that the only jobs government creates are government jobs. All others are created by entrepreneurs who put capital at risk with the expectation of turning a profit.

Lastly, Republican legislators aren’t the only ones dead set against such class warfare. So are a large number of their Democratic colleagues. So much so that on Oct. 6 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to allow the Jobs Act to come up for a vote because his own Democrat senators had indicated their intent to vote against it. Nor has Reid thus far allowed votes on more than a dozen bills passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

The Jobs Act is purely and simply a springboard for Obama’s reelection campaign. This “pass the bill now!” legislation was never expected to pass, and it won’t. It will, however, be used to try and paint Republicans as obstructionist, even though they control only one-third of the power in Washington, D.C., do not set the agenda and cannot act unilaterally to undo the negative effects of nearly three years of “hope and change.”

CHUCK CASSITY lives in Costa Mesa.