On Monday, Sept. 19, BHO published the grandiosely titled “Living Within Our Means and Investing in Our Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and deficit Reduction.” As promised after the address given to the join session a week or so earlier, this thing is supposed to explain how BHO intends to pay for his latest plan to squander an additional $447 billion without adding a cent to the 14.7 trillion-dollar debt.
Things are bad when BHO media loyalists like The Economist are unimpressed:
Sadly, the details of Mr Obama’s plan do not live up to the promising goals. On spending it relies too much on one-off cuts to the military and a laundry list of untried and controversial trims to mandatory programmes and on taxes, a frustratingly vague tax plan that sacrifices meaningful reform to the more symbolic goal of raising taxes on the rich.
This from page 2:
“The American Jobs Act would cut payroll taxes in half to 3.1 percent up to their first $5 million in wages, providing broad tax relief to all businesses but targeting it to the 98 percent of firms with wages below this level, and it would completely eliminate payroll taxes next year for any business that increases its payroll by hiring new workers or increasing wages for existing workers. The Act would also extend 100 percent expensing through 2012, allowing all firms—small and large—to take an immediate tax deduction on investments in new plants and equipment.”
This kind of incentivization is grounded in BHO’s perception of business owners as tempestuous twits—kids who need candy to make them grow their livelihood.
If consumers were flush with cash to spend, business would expand to meet the demand. Business is behaving prudently, because that’s what the market demands. If anything, a tough economy would indeed force increases in productivity: fewer and fewer workers are doing more and more of work.