So John Boehner just finished his long awaited speech on creating jobs ... but instead of offering any new ideas or new proposals, instead of showing any willingness to pass President Obama's American Jobs Act, he spent the better part of an hour recycling the same old Republican rhetoric about taxes, spending and regulation.
Yawn.
As anyone with a pulse could have predicted, Boehner blamed weak job growth on President Obama, saying:
“Job creators in America are essentially on strike,” Mr. Boehner said, according to excerpts released by the Speaker’s office. “The problem is not confusion about the policies. The problem is the policies.”
That's got to be the stupidest thing John Boehner has ever said. He's basically saying that business owners would rather protest the nation's fiscal and regulatory policy than make sense. But businesses don't go "on strike" when there's demand for their services and profit to be made. And even if they did, other businesses step in and meet the demand.
No, the problem is not that "job creators" have gone "on strike." The problem is that there isn't enough demand for their products and services. Boehner's fundamental misunderstanding of this basic fact is reflected in his belief that the deficit reduction super committee is actually a jobs committee:
“The joint committee is a jobs committee. Its mission is to reduce the deficit that is threatening job creation in our country.”
If there were any truth to what Boehner said, if "job creators" really were "on strike" and if they really did believe that "the joint committee is a jobs committee," then job growth would have soared after the conclusion of the debt deal in early August. Instead, this is what happened:
Thousands of jobs created per month in 2011 (
data source)
John Boehner might know a thing or two about golf. But on the economy, he's already working on a double bogey, and it's getting worse by the day.