Last year President Obama was pushing his American Jobs Act that he said would create or protect hundreds of thousands of jobs. In 2009 his $800 billion stimulus plan was supposed to create or save millions of jobs. President Obama is always talking about jobs – and criticizing Republicans for not caring about them.
So why is President Obama proposing to cut 100,000 government jobs and thousands of more jobs at government contractors? Because that is what he proposed yesterday when he went to the Pentagon to outline his plans to cut Defense Department spending way beyond what has already been agreed with Congress and way beyond what then-Defense Secretary Gates proposed last year.
President Obama is proposing to cut the Army by 80,000 men and women and the Marine Corps by 20,000. And cuts in Defense procurement will result in thousands more of job losses.
President Obama and his administration say that we have to cut defense spending because we can’t afford it. But he is proposing billions in subsidies for companies like Solyndra and other “green energy” initiatives. How many jobs did Solyndra create (other than for bankruptcy lawyers)? He also wants to spend billions for high speed rail, like between Bakersfield, California and Merced, California.* But soldiers we can’t afford.
This actually fits in with the stimulus plan that Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats wrote for President in 2009. They spent hundreds of billions of dollars looking to create jobs. They spent money for all kinds of things – except for the one thing where they could have ramped up spending quickly and gotten people hired: defense. What with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our stores of certain weapons were down. We needed to build up inventories. It would have been good to do it, and we could have done it – and we would have created jobs in doing so. But the Democrats didn’t give any of that stimulus money to the Defense Department.
And now President, who claims we need to spend more money for jobs for Americans, is cutting the Army and the Marines because we can’t afford defense – even though we can afford Solyndra and high speed rail from Bakersfield to Merced.
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* "Solyndra on Rails," The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2012.
Update (1/6/12 5:05 pm): Corrected a typo in the fourth paragraph.
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