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.

 

Reading one of the newspaper reports about the Roy Blunt-Robin Carnahan debate last night, I was struck by a no doubt trivial detail. At one point, talking about jobs, Blunt claimed that

Our jobs plan is over 100 pages. Secretary of Carnahan’s jobs plan is under 500 words _ you could tweet her jobs plan in four tweets,” said Blunt, referring to the Internet social networking site, Twitter.

Does he mean this Jobs Plan which can be downloaded from his campaign Webpage? Because I swear I can’t find more than 20 pages. Does he think that the linked references comprise part of the Plan? If so, I’ve got news for him – they don’t. I’ve also got to say that lots of those 20 pages don’t amount to more than boilerplate and whining about the Obama administration.

Am I really mistaken, or is this one more instance of Roy the serial liar? There are folks who just can’t resist a fib, no matter how silly. Is there another version of the “Jobs Plan,”  have I not seen it all, or is Roy one of those sad, dissembling individuals? I’m confused.

Update: The account of the debate in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch omitted Blunt’s assertion that his jobs plan had more than a hundred pages:

Blunt stressed his theme of private sector job creation, accusing Carnahan of lacking details on how she would boost the economy. He used a reference to the popular social media network, Twitter, to make his sharpest jab in the debate.

“You could tweet her jobs plan in four tweets,” he said.

An odd omission since the “four tweets” comment is part of a comparative statement.  

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.

Today’s the day that some important, initial provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) go into effect.  Given that a majority of the 23% of Missourians who participated in last August’s primaries voted to challenge the ACA, and that state GOPers are still making wild claims about what it will or won’t do, clear, simple, unbiased explanations of the law’s provisions are more important than ever, and that’s exactly what the video below offers. It’s produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Reform Source, an excellent resource, by the way, and it offers a succinct, easy to understand, nine minute summary of the provisions of the ACA and the controversies that surround them:  

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

As Think Progress notes, it’s ironic that on what is essentially ACA day zero, Congressional Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” the GOP plan for the 112th Congress if they take charge after November. An important part of their agenda is the repeal and “replacement” of the ACA. This should not come as a suprise to us in Missouri; state GOPers  have been throwing tantrums since the legislation passed. Its repeal is even included in Roy Blunt’s corporate giveaway list jobs plan:

Repeal and Replace Obamacare – The Democrats’ Government Takeover will cost at least a trillion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  I’m for repeal of this massive spending bill and replacing it with common sense health care solutions that will create jobs and drive down health care costs.

Oddly enough, though, as The Wonk Room‘s Igor Volsky observes, most of the replacements to ACA provisions that the GOP document puts forward are all already included in the ACA itself. We have to assume that these are also the replacements that Roy Blunt is speaking about in his jobs plan since they echo his past proposals. What is not included, though, is:

… how Republicans plan to offset the $140 billion deficit increase that will result from repealing the ACA or how they’ll lower health care spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the GOP’s previous very similar health care plan  – presented by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) as an alternative to the House health care bill – would increase the number of uninsured to 52 million in 2019 and reduce the deficit by only $68 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

Since the national GOP “Pledge” and Roy Blunt’s very compatible “Jobs Plan” are both really big on railing about deficits – at least in the abstract – it’s surprising that neither address this concern. Perhaps the best characterization of the “Pledge,” and one that can be equally applied to Blunt’s jobs plan, comes from a conservative blogger, Erik Erikson of RedState, who charged that “This document proves the GOP is more focused on the acquisition of power than the advocacy of long term sound public policy.” Well Duh! Maybe more Missourians should keep that in mind when they see ads dinging Carnahan for supporting health care reform.