I ended up watching the President's speech. It's probably sixth speech of the year that I've watched him give. It needed to be a five-star speech. By the end....I was feeling mostly it fell into the 2-star marginal speech category. The jobs potential? It's hard to say. It kinda felt like a guy was having a heart attack and we needed to use the defibrillator but in this case....we just had a K-Mart defibrillator with four AAA-batteries in it. The "jolt" might just be a tingle, and I'd be in NCAA-heaven with Bama playing Auburn everyday (it's the best a guy from Bama could hope for....Iron Bowl in heaven daily).
The $450 billion? Well....it'll come out of some imaginary pocket like the $800 billion that we found for stimulus a while back. If it did turn around the jobs market, then we'd actually have more folks paying taxes, and maybe make the money back. But if you only created 100k jobs over twelve months with the $450 billion, then it's mostly a waste of time and money.
At some point....I had this deja vu feeling over "pass the bill". Later on, some journalist commented....it got mentioned seventeen times during this speech. I kept thinking it was a psychological thing.....like when Luke Skywalker used his Jeda powers to make some dopey guy do something that he wouldn't normally do. Luke usually had his hand out and was focusing hard on his victim. To be honest, I never saw any mortal character in Star Wars defeat the Jeda mindmelt deal. It's hard to say if that Boehner guy or Cantor kid from Virginia can stand up against the President's Jeda powers. Mortal men just can't fight it....usually.
So will it pass? I'm thinking that the House ought to split this up into individual bills....for each single item. Up and down vote. Seventy percent of the bills would easily pass by the Republicans in the House, and likely stop in the Senate because they just won't dare stand for twenty-odd bills. Frankly, they'd likely say it's all or none....making Boehner and Cantor mostly grin that the old guys in the Senate just weren't up to one-page bills (too much to read).
The plan to fix roads and schools? Which ones? Even split amongst all fifty states? You can imagine everyone wanting a chunk of the money to do something with Route 16 highway, the old gym at the school, and replacing a 64-year old bridge considered unsafe. The issue is that you don't have a list sitting there with projects ready to go (remember, don't utter "shovel ready" in any national audience or folks start laughing). I'm guessing over 900 principals are pulling out their dream plans tomorrow morning and trying to convince Senator Tubby that they truly need eight million to build this great school annex building. You figure four months to argue over this priority list of projects, another six months to get the contracts fixed up and signed, and another eighteen months before the school is finished. There's limits to this concept.
Then I came to the end of this speech. It felt like a political huddle with a coach giving you his strategy. Confidence wasn't really overflowing on this matter. It might have some effect, but not as much as you'd like. Would it convince a company to grow it's jobs base? No. Would it convince a boss to hire up forty more employees? Maybe, but the President left out the various regulations that he'd dump (momentarily). So that wasn't going to help much.
