I’ll give this to Herb Rule, he’s definitely feisty. The press release his campaign just put out hits Griffin hard for his support of yet another in the endless line of fake “jobs bills” he’s supported:
Yesterday, House Republicans passed a do-nothing bill that will prevent the President from fighting unemployment. Herb Rule said, “All Americans are opposed to over regulation. But you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Griffin’s bill has no chance of becoming law because it makes no sense and would do crazy things like (1) stop the scheduling of new increases in vets benefits, (2) prevent the fair application of family and medical leave for military personnel, (3) prevent doctors from being paid fair fees for treating seniors and the disabled, and (4) prevent setting dates and limits for Arkansas’s migratory bird hunting seasons.
Griffin’s bill will do nothing to help Arkansans get work and support their families. It’s just a smoke screen for his failure to help real people.
A lot of Arkansans are out of work and Griffin wants to cut back on helping folks out. It’s absurd to do nothing about unemployment until unemployment is lower. It’s just spitting in the face of the out-of-work to call it a jobs bill.”
Bruce Bartlett, former economist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, has said that the idea that cutting regulation will lead to significant job growth is “just nonsense. It’s just made up.”[1] “This is just Griffin’s last ditch effort to be able to say that he got one bill passed,” Rule said.
Now of course, this is just another in a long list of bills Griffin and House Republicans gotten behind that won’t really create any jobs:
“A lot of these things are laughable in terms of a jobs plan that would produce noticeable improvements across the country in the availability of employment in the next four or five years,” said Gary Burtless, a senior economist at Brookings. “Even in the long run, if they have any effect all, it would be extremely marginal, relative to the jobs deficit we currently have.”
Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, agreed that the bills would have almost no effect on job creation in the short term, though he was slightly more optimistic about their long-term prospects.
“These kind of changes will matter over a period of three to five years,” Zandi said. “It takes that long before businesses can digest changes and respond to them.”
He noted, though, that legislation as narrowly targeted as the Republican package is unlikely to do much for real job creation.
“For it to show up in a meaningful way in the natural economy, you can make specific changes that could affect a specific industry or a few companies, but it’s not going to make a big difference in terms of the monthly job numbers,” Zandi said. “It takes some very significant changes across lots of different industries to really make a big difference.”
Carl Riccadonna, a senior economist at Deutsche Bank, said some of the bills could create jobs, but that they would amount to more of an afterthought in terms of achieving broader policy goals.
“They are very narrowly targeted, and it gives the impression that maybe some of this is special interest really pursuing these, not really taking a macro view but a very, very micro focus in what the impact would be,” Riccadonna said. For most of the bills in the package, “jobs are a second- or third-order effect, not the main priority.”
This particular one Rule has singled out was so bad as to be part of a John Stewart joke. If Griffin and other Republicans actually cared about jobs and the economy they’d join Democrats and the President in passing a real jobs bill, like the American Jobs Act. But of course they want the economy to fail in hopes of it bringing them political gain, but they don’t want to look like the obstructionists they are so they trot out all these fake jobs bills that won’t do a thing to help anyone. It’s really no surprise-for a pathological liar like Tim Griffin this kind of dishonesty comes as naturally as breathing the air.
It’s very simple. Herb Rule and the Democrats are for a real jobs bill. Tim Griffin and Republicans want the economy to fail and will only pass phony “jobs bills” that won’t actually create jobs. The choice is clear-contribute to Rule for Congress.
