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WASHINGTON — President Obama’s plan to reverse the nation’s staggering jobless rate is held together with a paper clip!
“Here it is,” Obama said, waving a copy of his jobs plan during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden yesterday, an enormous paper clip binding the pages together.
But the odds of his jobs bill holding together when it hits Congress grew longer yesterday with new details showing that Obama wants to pay for virtually all of the $447 billion plan with tax hikes.
The hikes target the wealthy and symbols of wealth like corporate jets and oil companies — setting up a political clash as Obama tries to hammer Congress into enacting his plan.
“I’m sending this bill today, and they ought to pass it immediately,” Obama said in the Rose Garden, while surrounded by cops, firefighters and teachers whom he said would benefit from his jobs bill.
“No games, no politics, no delays,” he intoned.
Obama, who delivered his plan to Congress last night, is trying to put the onus on Republicans to step forward and approve it, or appear to the public that they are holding back his effort to deal with the jobs crisis.
“Instead of just talking about America’s jobs creators, let’s actually do something for America’s jobs creators,” Obama said. “We can do that by passing this bill.”
The biggest tax hike, at $400 billion, would lower itemized deductions for charitable contributions by wealthy earners making more than $200,000.
Obama had floated the idea in one of his earlier budgets, but it went nowhere in Congress.
“We can’t afford everything. We have to make choices,” said White House budget director Jack Lew, defending the plan’s financing.
Republicans immediately fumed that Obama was playing politics by proposing tax hikes that Republicans have already sworn to oppose.
“It would be fair to say this tax increase on job creators is the kind of proposal both parties have opposed in the past. We remain eager to work together on ways to support job growth, but this proposal doesn’t appear to have been offered in that bipartisan spirit,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.
And Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said, “For the president to sit here and say, ‘It’s pass my bill all or nothing,’ that’s just not the way things are done anywhere in Washington.”
“Anything that is akin to the stimulus bill, I think, is not going to be acceptable to the American people,” Cantor said.
Obama didn’t use the word “stimulus,” but the bill itself references the law by its formal name, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Obama’s jobs plan would expand and extend a payroll tax cut, while providing new infrastructure spending on schools and roads, plus funds to keep teachers and other state workers on the payroll.
With the bill coming in at more than 150 pages, tucked-in provisions include spending $3 billion to buy and fix urban buses along with “tribal transit programs,” and spending cash to make private schools compliant with disability laws.
Obama is hitting the road today to try to drum up support for this plan. He campaigns today in Boehner’s home state of Ohio, with an appearance in Columbus, and will appear tomorrow at a small business in North Carolina.
Both are swing states critical to his re-election chances.
Obama was even more direct about the politics of the battle yesterday, when he appeared with his aides on several African-American news Web sites and suggested that a defeat of his plan in Congress could turn into a political win.
“I need people to be out there promoting this and pushing this and making sure that everybody understands the details of what this would mean, so that one of two things happen: Either Congress gets it done, or if Congress doesn’t get it done, people know exactly what’s holding it up,” Obama said.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee launched an ad promoting the plan in battleground states, telling viewers to “Read it. Fight for it … Pass the President’s Jobs Plan.”
The administration isn’t making any firm projections about its impact on persistent unemployment, but Lew said yesterday that it would create “millions” of jobs and cited an outside analysis claiming it could lead to 1.9 million new jobs.
Additional reporting by S.A. Miller