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Obama talks a big game — but offers more of same

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With his back against the wall, Barack Obama woke up from his depressed slumbers last night and gave us the first glimpse of Obama the Orator we’ve seen since his talk in Arizona after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting back in January.

His jobs speech was an energetic, spicy humdinger that finally gave his depressed base a few desperately needed tingles after months of unmitigatedly bad news for them and for him.

He was the firebrand populist liberal they so want him to be, throwing hundreds of billions of federal dollars around as though it were confetti and declaring the greatness of America is primarily to be discerned in that which has been done through government action.

“We are rugged individualists,” he conceded initially before launching into a paean to “a belief that we are all connected and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.”

As Obama tells it, the greatness of Abraham Lincoln was not only that he saved the Union, but that he started the National Academy of Sciences. More recently, we established our greatness by building schools and community colleges, not to mention “our highways and our bridges, our dams and our airports.”

Now, that’s not really a mark of national greatness, since even North Korea has highways and bridges and dams and airports.

But Obama’s fetishistic invocation of the glory of infrastructure projects is directly related to his unyielding certitude — a certitude unaltered despite the failure of his last stimulus — that the federal government needs to take a lead role in thecountry’s employment crisis by employing people directly itself.

He did propose incentives to private-sector employers, but those incentives do not involve much in the way of lessening their regulatory or tax burden. Obama mentioned he had initiated a review of onerous federal regulations but had so far identified only 500 he could do away with.

And he spoke once again of making the wealthy pay more in taxes, which directly affects the ability of small-business owners to employ more people.

At the heart of his incentive program were tax credits. For example, he said, someone who employs 50 people would receive $80,000, or $1,600 per worker. The average US salary is $46,000 per year, and that’s before the cost of benefits. Obama’s incentive would reduce an employer’s burden by something like 3 percent.

That won’t do much. But it does have the benefit, for Obama, of being a direct federal intervention in job creation.

So there’s the big difference between Obama and his ideological rivals — he believes in government’s guiding hand, and his rivals believe in reducing the burden of government as a means of clearing the decks for economic growth.

That’s what this next election is going to be fought over. And that’s fine. What isn’t fine is the outright trickery with which Obama claims his new plan is going to be fully paid for off the bat.

He says the debt-ceiling super-committee, which has begun searching for $1.5 trillion to cut from the federal government, will find another $447 billion to pay for this American Jobs Act.

In the end, he offered no reason to believe that if it were entirely enacted it would actually do much other than act as yet another subsidy for the core of his base, unionized workers who already have jobs.

It was a corker of a speech, but it was nonsense on stilts — and its purpose was patent and cynical.