A Jobs Plan To Create Real Jobs

Recovery: Countering the president's demand that Congress "pass this jobs plan right away," House Speaker John Boehner described a pro-growth GOP jobs strategy. The big difference: This strategy will produce jobs.

Speaking at an appropriate venue — the Economic Club of Washington's Ronald Reagan Building — the leader of the House Republican majority said something that should be the keynote message of next year's efforts to bring the principles of economic freedom back into the Oval Office.

"We need to recognize who really creates jobs in America," the speaker said. "It's the private sector."

The last two and a half years prove that giving private sector players no reason to invest in the economy — battering them with regulations and casting them as the villains of American society — leads to investors, perfectly rationally, not investing in the economy.

John Boehner illustrated this when, referring to one of Obama's new jump-through-the-hoops promised tax breaks, he pointed out that "businesses are not going to hire someone for a $4,000 tax credit if government mandates impose long-term costs on them that significantly exceed the temporary credit."

Put another way, swallowing the poison of the president's economics policies is not worth tasting their candy coating.

But Boehner raised an even deeper concern about the president's job-creation efforts so far.

"My worry is that for American job creators, all the uncertainty is turning to fear that this toxic environment for job creation is a permanent state," he said.

Boehner asked in astonishment in regard to the federal government suing Boeing for relocating a factory, "Let's make sure I have this straight: Under current rules, American companies are free to create jobs in China, but they aren't free to create them in South Carolina?"

He also made it plain that Congress' new bipartisan "Supercommittee" would not raise taxes.

"Tax increases destroy jobs. And the Joint Committee is a jobs committee," the speaker said, hoping that the new panel might even lay the long-term groundwork for a tax reform lowering both individual and corporate rates.

Boehner proposed a series of pro-growth measures:

The recently released House Republican "America's Job Creators" plan also proposes the audit of existing regs, passage of the pending free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, as well as ideas that would clearly have to wait for a Republican president, like tax reform with a top tax rate of 25%.

Boehner signaled that Republicans might help Obama pass his proposed payroll tax cut. But as welcome as any tax cut is, the key to job creation is found in the other ideas Boehner mentioned.

Taken together, Boehner's ideas form the kind of jobs bill — unlike Obama's Stimulus 2.0 — that would actually produce jobs.