Does President Obama have the foggiest idea how jobs are created in America? There's not much evidence he does, beyond lip service to the helpfulness of the private sector.
When the president begins a speech these days with praise for free markets, look out! What comes next are proposals for more government intervention in the economy and higher taxes. That's the recipe, Obama says, to "encourage our long-term economic growth and stabilize our budget."
He said so in his Republicans-are-Social-Darwinists speech in Washington two weeks ago to newspaper editors. Near the outset, Obama declared: "I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I've cut taxes for small-business owners 17 times over the last three years."
Obama's latest fixation is the Buffett Rule, named after billionaire Warren Buffett. "We can't afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for wealthy Americans," the president said last week. (Note: Under Obamanomics, untaxed earnings of private citizens are "spending.") The new rule would force those earning more than $1 million to pay at least 30 percent of their annual income, whether earnings (already taxed at a marginal rate of 35 percent) or capital gains (now taxed at 15 percent), in income tax. "This is not just about fairness," the president said. "This is also about growth." And thus about jobs, and more.
But not deficit reduction, according to Jason Furman, the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council. He said the 30 percent tax was "never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control." It would raise only $4 billion to $5 billion a year, a peewee bite out of Obama's $1.3 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2012.
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