You remember Crossroads GPS? Carl Rove’s consortium of shadowy big bucks donors who finance what we laughingly designate “issue” ads prior to big political campaigns? I’m betting that the Daddy Warbucks behind the group are sitting back and congratulating themselves on their wisdom in investing in helping the public understand Roy Blunt’s issues in 2010. They are perhaps beginning to see some concrete returns on their investment.

According to PoliticMO, Blunt has gone from muttering invectives against the President, who has the gall to propose increasing taxes on “job creators” (i.e., rich people), and sputtering about “job-killing” regulations, to proposing a little action. Or, actually, make that inaction, since he  is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban any new regulations for a year.  According to Blunt:

I’ve met with countless job creators in Missouri who have told me that regulatory uncertainty is one of the greatest obstacles to growing their businesses

There’re those job creators again. Makes you wonder how much Blunt takes in after a listening session with well-healed corporate contributors, uh … job creators.

Also of note: the reference to business “uncertainty” coming from a member of the party that threatened to shut down the government, and may be planning to repeat the whole hostage process again; caused the first-ever U.S. credit downgrade; and helped overturn a longish period during which the stock market seemed to be recovering. Doesn’t Senator Blunt think that politically motivated hi-jinks like these might be responsible for some of that uncertainity he is so worried about?

And while we’re talking abut chutzpah, what is it in our political environment that permits a politician like Blunt to propose, with a straight face, to kill regulations – across the board, with no consideration of their goals and the situation they are designed to address – after we have just experienced a near depression that is uniformly acknowledged to have been the result of lax financial regulation for which he personally, as a member of past GOP leadership, bears no small smattering of blame.

As I said earlier, the Crossroads GPS money men are no doubt more than satisfied with their boy Blunt. So much so, in fact, that they are already beginning their assault on Claire McCaskill’s Senate seat.

Wanna see how Senator McCaskill’s doing as she tries to dance the red state/blue state tango?  If so, take a look at Joan McCarter’s reportage on DailyKos. Hint: it has to do with spending and jobs creation, specifically why McCaskill thinks we have to worry about the former and don’t dare discuss the latter, and it involves statements like:

Setting realistic expectations is one thing. Shooting your own party in the foot is quite another, and it sure seems like in trying to do the former, Sen. Claire McCaskill achieves the latter.

After you read McCarter’s piece, also consider the fact that McCaskill is touting her co-sponsorship of a “Democratic” Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) – or, as I call it, BBA Lite, since it is a little milder than the drop-dead dumb BBA proposals put forward by the GOP:

The amendment supported by McCaskill requires balanced budgets to begin in five years, aims to protect entitlements, and  allows congress to opt-out in times of war.

Additionally, the Democrat’s version prevents congress from passing tax cuts for individuals earning more than $1 million a year unless the country maintains a surplus, a provision that could face opposition from Republicans.

McCaskill may attempt to cut out the really ugly parts, but a BBA is still a very bad idea all by itself, as commentators from the left, along with a few honest, half-way intelligent folks from the right, agree. It’s not just a bad idea, though, it’s the lazy politician’s way to build rigidity into a system that requires flexibility, all just so that they can avoid having to do what we elect them to do – govern.

But the worst of it is the rhetorical trope McCaskill uses to justify this particular walk on the red side. She dredges up the incessant and dishonest GOP metaphor that misleadingly compares family and government finances, and declares “Congress ought to do what families in Missouri do every day: live within their means.” Actually, even though governments are very different types of entities than families, families themselves do take out mortgages to buy houses, and secure loans to send their children to college and make large purchases. Even in Missouri. Responsibly managed debt gives us greater flexibility and the option is absolutely essential for the government as well.

I am sure that McCaskill thinks that she is cleverly stealing GOP thunder, cutting the rug out from under the other guys by calling for a BBA that doesn’t exactly go after the same targets and then calling them out when they object. I am sure she thinks that using their own language makes it all just that much more insidious.

Unfortunately, all McCaskill’s really doing, besides trying to save her backside in a conservative state, is helping to legitimate right wing positions. If even Democrats talk the GOP talk and refuse to question the basis of GOP claims about the need to cut spending, even as we are potentially sliding into another recession, the dialogue will go no further. We will continue to talk about spending when we should be talking about jobs. It would take courage to try to change the terms of discourse, to go on the offensive in order to throw the GOP steam-roller off-track and, sadly, courage so often seems to fall victim to a misguided, purely political pragmatism.

I do believe that the best way to insure that we eventually arrive in progressive Nirvana is to vote as left as you can given your options, and in Missouri right now, the only option, the putative “left” political establishment, is staking out territory on the center-right side of the room. Since I don’t foresee a primary challenge to Senator McCaskill, I’ll continue to support her, but I do wish she wouldn’t go out of her way to make it so hard, especially since I’m not sure it’s going to do her much good in the long run. She won’t win the Tea Partiers, and, in the meanwhile, she sure has pissed off lots of progressives. I  hope those legendary independents the “moderate” Democrats all claim to be courting are worth it.

Addendum: Guess who else thinks that a balanced budget amendment is a bad idea?  As per Steve Benen, none other than Standard & Poors. Hear that Claire?

* Edited slight for clarity.

During the past few weeks, Roy Blunt has managed to mention his “jobs plan” in just about every other sentence, and like that fish story where the fish gets bigger and bigger with each retelling, it seems the job plan also gets bigger and bigger with each retelling. He’s so proud of it that last night, during his debate with Robin Carnahan, he inflated his 20 page plan to 100 pages, comparing it with what he called Carnahan’s “500 word plan.”

Not only was he mistaken about the size of his plan, but he also misspoke about Carnahan’s “jobs plan.” Rather than a detailed blueprint for jobs creation, you will find on Carnahan’s campaign Webpage a list of general “commonsense” principles that she would use to guide her efforts as a legislator charged with creating jobs, a principled, intelligent approach to a complex issue that will be only be resolved as part of a cooperative, congressional effort.

When I try to reduce Blunt’s plan to similar principles, I come up with three sentences that left me with a serious (and not very pleasant) case of deja vu:

1. Cut social spending, some administrative government expenses, and privatize wherever possible in order to cut the deficit.

2. Cut taxes

3. Gut industrial and business regulation.

Bearing in mind the “500 word” jibe, I tried, just for fun, to list each more or less substantive proposal listed in his plan in order to count the words. After cutting out the standard GOP talking points and the empty whinging about the Obama administration and the Democratic congress, I was left with about 280 words.

You will notice if you read the shorter Blunt jobs plan below, that it is seriously uneven and often duplicative. There are big, vague proposals combined with extremely specific and often rather trivial proposals. Many would have a questionable or even a negative effect on either job creation or deficit reduction, which is one of the legs of his plan, others would probably have some small effect, while still others reference future issues (e.g., cap-and-trade, which is already probably dead for the near term). What they all have in common is that, taken together, they could be mistaken for a wish-list prepared by Blunt’s corporate donors and lobbyist pals.

If you want to read Blunt’s six point jobs plan in the 280 word version, jump below the fold. (There’s also an excellent analysis of the deficit cutting claims Blunt makes about his proposed spending cuts over at FiredUP Missouri if Blunt’s jobs mania interests you.)

Roy Blunt’s job plan in 280 words:

Cut spending : Take back unspent stimulus;  “reform” entitlements (i.e., privatize Social Security, slash welfare?) ; cut welfare; reform Fannie and Freddie Mac, sell Excess government property;  cut subsidies to unions (i.e., prohibit public employees from doing union business at work ); cut memberships to funny sounding international organizations; and slash duplicative government  agencies; and freeze domestic discretionary spending at 2008 levels.

Stabilize marketplace: Let industry call all the shots (i.e., cut  business taxes  and gut regulations); repeal the Affordable Care Act; extend the homeowners tax credit;  lower the tax depreciation schedule; enact tort reform

Promote American energy through American Energy Act (H.R. 2846) which promotes coal,  oil, nuclear energy and has a nodding relationship to alternative fuel development; repeals prohibition on government purchase of fuels from dirty sources like oil shale, tar sands and coal-to liquid technology; encourages “clean” coal-to-liquid technology; gives tax credits for producing renewable electricity and investment tax credits for solar energy and fuel cell properties; extends the biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credits; permits deep water drilling.

Create access to credit for business: Repeal the Financial Reform Bill and deep-six the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB); reduce the business tax depreciation schedule

Expand U.S. Exports:  Enact pending NAFTA-like trade agreements with Columbia, Korea and Panama.

“Creative” new policies to promote business growth by getting government out of the way of businesses so that they can do by themselves what they haven’t been able to do by themselves to date:: extend Bush tax cuts, cut taxes that haven’t been enacted such as taxes on certain partnership profit interests.; squash Cap-and-trade; kill ergonomics regulations, repeal drilling moratorium, end small business reporting mandates, repeal Affordable Care Act.

 

GOP candidates have been running their mouths a lot about jobs, mostly in relation to lower taxes for their favored, well-off constituencies. Roy Blunt’s campaign for Senate, for instance, has produced a “Jobs Plan,” that is long on GOP boiler-plate (and equally long on “solutions” that seem designed to play well with the energy and telecom industries who support his political ambitions so generously). Rhetoric aside, what does the current GOP record actually look like when proposals that would really have an impact on employment are put on the table?

A rarely discussed structural problem that contributes to the current jobless recovery is that many of the good-paying, manufacturing jobs have been outsourced over the past decade – good for corporations that can exploit the poor in third world countries with impunity, bad for the U.S. employment picture. Roy Blunt doesn’t even mention this problem in his jobs plan. GOP Senate team-player, Kit Bond, voted just this week to keep a bill from coming up for a vote that would have imposed tax penalties on companies that outsource their production. Claire McCaskill, on the other hand, voted to end debate and permit a vote on the legislation.

Small business owners often cite tight credit that discourages expansion to explain their failure to hire new workers. However, Republicans, who talk endlessly about the importance of small businesses for recovery, have for months stonewalled legislation designed to address just that issue.

The long-stalled small business lending legislation was passed in the Senate only recently with the help of two Republican Senators who plan to retire at the end of their current terms, which means that they no longer need fear repercussions from the NO party’s leadership or its Tea Party-addled base. However, Missouri’s retiring Republican Senator, Kit Bond, good GOP soldier that he is, kept faith and continued to march in lockstep with the Party of NO (jobs).

On the House side, Roy Blunt was so busy out on the campaign trail running his mouth about jobs creation that he couldn’t manage to even vote on the Small Business Lending Fund Act of 2010. But Blaine Luetkemeyer, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves, and Todd Akin made up for Roy’s indisposition, and handily voted against the interests of the small businesses they love to talk up as the real job creators. You want to know how Missouri Democratic Reps. Carnahan, Cleaver, Clay, and Skelton voted? If you even have to ask, just click on their names and learn who really stands with the middle class.

There are lots of clichés that reflect how strongly Americans feel abut personal integrity: walking the walk, talking out of both sides of your mouth, putting up or shutting up – you can probably supply many more. Today’s question is, when it comes to jobs for ordinary, middle class Americans, as opposed to more moolah for the GOP’s corporate sugar daddies, how many Republicans can you point to who walk the walk, talk straight, and put up when push comes to shove. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see too many in our Missouri GOP congressional delegation.

At a meeting with “local job creators” at Consolidated Machine and Welding in Hannibal, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-7th) spread a little of the usual Republican B.S. about the effects of the stimulus:

The selfishness of what the government is doing and realizing that it is wrong and unsustainable and probably in that order. Even if it was sustainable, it’s wrong to decide we’re going to spend whatever we want and we’re going to let someone else figure out how to pay …

Kind of incoherent, but I think I know what he’s trying to say – and what I want to know is why didn’t anybody tell Blunt that the stimulus is working? According to a recent article in the National Journal:

If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Thanks to the massive job losses of the Bush recession, we won’t be out of the woods for a long time, but a good case can be made that Pat Garofalo of Think Progress is justified in claiming that the continuing improvement “is a strong sign that the economic stimulus package passed last year is doing what it is supposed to.”

And guess what?  Garofalo adds that contrary to the standard Republican talking point when confronted with job growth statistics, most of the new jobs were not in the public, but in the private sector – an important indicator that the economy is turning around. In all, 523,000 new jobs have been added in the private sector in the first four months of 2010.

Even the slight uptick in unemployment to 9.9% is less disappointing than in the past since, according to White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, “such a rise in the labor force often occurs in recoveries as workers who had dropped out of the labor force are drawn back in by improved employment opportunities.” Further reinforcing the meme of a recovering job market, The Wall Street Journal notes:

More U.S. workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March, the second month in a row this occurred and a sign of employees’ growing confidence that more positions are becoming available in a slowly recovering job market.

If Roy Blunt wants to keep on blathering abut the stimulus and the debt burden for future generations, somebody really ought to give him a few facts about the relationship between debt and economic growth. It’s simple really – if we create jobs now and grow the economy, there will be less debt for future generations, not more.

If all that was necessary for recovery was, in Roy’s words, for “government to step aside and let Main Street employers create the jobs that are needed most,” we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in now – after all, it was eight years of laissez faire, hands-off, and every man for himself that got us into the mess we’re in in the first place – and all the desperate lies of sad, ideologically irrelevant pols like poor old Roy can’t really change that fact. The truth always comes out in the end.

Recently it has seemed that when we elected Claire McCaskill, we got a Republican in sheep’s clothing. First it was her FISA vote; later, after a promising start, she hedged on the public option. Then, because Missouri is evidently a fiefdom of Peabody coal which expects tribute from its political vassals, she dutifully bad-mouthed cap-and-trade. Most recently, she has been working overtime to make sure that the Tea Party leaning folks back home don’t forget that she is one fiscally conservative gal – in ways that may well hinder the country’s economic recovery.

Last week she was one of five Democrats who joined with Republicans to defeat the Murray-Kerry amendment, which would have extended two provisions of last year’s stimulus bill. The measure would have provided summer jobs for young people this year and an extension of enhanced subsidies for poor families with children. This action comes smack, dab in the middle of a major employment crisis when congress needs to be paying attention to jobs.

Instead, among the programs that McCaskill helped Republicans block, was the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) emergency fund, a program funding that would have eventually subsidized 100,000 jobs. According to Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of Economic Policy Institute, the two  provisions of the defeated amendment together would have been:

…more efficient at creating jobs than the much-ballyhooed new hires tax credit introduced by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

McCaskill clings to her fiscally responsible shtick as if it’s a political life-raft. There might be times, given the makeup of her constituency, when we could put up with all this please-God-don’t-let-them-think-I’m-a-tax-and-spend-liberal pandering, but right now is not one of them. We desperately need politicians with the courage to do the right thing no matter the political consequences, and, as far as I am concerned, McCaskill just blew one more chance to show that she has the right stuff.

From his campaign tour bus, Roy Blunt twitters:

Missourians are enterprising people. We don’t need the govt to create jobs. We’ll create jobs if govt will move over. #RoyBluntBusTour

Before we let Mr. Blunt get away with this, there are a few inconvenient facts that he needs to explain.

As of December 2009, Missouri’s unemployment rate was 9.6%, very close to the highest ever recorded rate of 10.3% in 1983. That miserable statistic, of course, is the result of the deepest national recession since the great depression, brought to us, as all honest economists agree, by the tax and regulation cutting GOP. The lowest unemployment rate recorded in Missouri was 2.3% in 2000, under the liberal Mel Carnahan, during the last years of the liberal Clinton administration.

When Roy’s son, little Matty, ascended to the Missouri statehouse, he along with his Republican legislative enforcers in Jefferson City brought unemployment to highs of 6-8%. Doesn’t actually inspire confidence in Mr. Blunt’s grandiose claims about what he and his anti-government fellow travelers can achieve, does it?

Of course, there’s also the inconvenient fact that government interference in the form of the stimulus, maligned as it is by good old boys like Roy, probably saved our goose – even though it’s still a skinny old bird. The question is whether or not the likes of Roy Blunt, touting their failed economic theology, are the people to fatten the goose back up and give us some of those golden eggs.