Today, the President took to the podium again to tout his supposed jobs plan. This time he appeared with a legislative prop in hand that was, presumably, the bill itself. Despite his command (made at least a dozen times) that Congress pass his bill, it's unclear how lawmakers are supposed to do that without the actual bill. The President has claimed Congress will have the bill this evening. Why wait to make it public if it's already written down?

The President is running the risk of becoming his own parody. If anything, this administration has been a blatant illustration of what doesn't create jobs: 1) government spending 2) talking about government spending. Unfortunately, these are the only job creation tactics we've seen from this President.

  • February 17, 2009: Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. He claims the trillion dollar spending and debt package will create 3 to 4 million jobs and keep unemployment below 8 percent. Neither of these promises even came even close to be fulfilled.
  • August 10, 2010: the House of Representatives is called back from August recess to pass a $26 billion bailout for the states. The President claims this will save 160,000 teaching jobs. This strategy didn't seem to work, since the President made the same claim about his new "jobs" plan today. If at first you don't succeed…
  • April 13, 2011: Less than two months after releasing his official budget, President Obama calls for a redux, giving a speech that was to serve, ostensibly, as the Obama Budget 2.0. This new plan invented its own baseline, and can't be scored by an objective source such as CBO since they only score real legislation…not speeches
  • September 8, 2011: The President delivers an address to a Joint Session of Congress announcing his jobs plan. The President promises a $500 billion plan, but offers few details and no written text of a plan that sounds remarkably like the first failed "stimulus" plan.
  • September 12, 2011: The President holds a press conference to announce that he will send his plan to Congress; a goal he apparently didn't think was clear in his appeal to Congress to "pass this bill" 17 times in the address the previous week.

    The President also promises in his remarks that he will release a "deficit reduction" plan…next week. Following this trend, that would mean taxpayers have two more speeches to go before there's legislative language of that as well.