Congressman Roskam and Creating Jobs: A Response to Walt Zlotow

I chuckled as I read entitled “Congressman Roskam Job Creation: An Enigma Wrapped in a Riddle.”  Not because the title was backwards – Winston Churchill famously refused to predict what Russia would do because that was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” – but because Zlotow’s criticism of Roskam was backwards.

Zlotow complains that Roskam opposes the American Jobs Act, also known as “Son-of-Stimulus,” but who could support it?  The first stimulus –the “shovel ready jobs” stimulus –gave us thousands of roadside advertisements proclaiming “this project brought to you by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” but it gave us very few jobs.  According to CBO numbers, that stimulus created jobs at a cost of anywhere from $540,000 to $4.1 million per job.

The long-term effect of the first earlier stimulus was not to add jobs, but to add $831 billion to the national debt.  This new one, if it passed, would add another $447 billion on top of that, and how many new jobs would it create?  At what cost per job?  It is not difficult to understand opposition to Son-of-Stimulus.

Zlotow disliked the debt-ceiling-crisis last summer, as did we all.  Apparently, he would have preferred a rubber-stamp of President Obama’s original request of raising the debt limit without any restraint or conditions to get spending under control. Zlotow claims that the dispute over the debt ceiling “spooked financial markets,” hurting job creation.  But financial markets were “spooked” by the size of the federal debt, and they were disappointed that the cuts were not deeper.  Roskam can’t be blamed for pushing debt-reduction.

Finally, Zlotow attacks Roskam for voting to repeal Obamacare, saying that a repeal will leave insurance companies free to deny medical claims based on technicalities.  The president passed Obamacare promising that you could keep you current health insurance, and it would reduce premiums, and it was absolutely not a tax.  But we now know that millions of families will lose their employer-based health insurance, and premiums will rise, and Obamacare imposes a $804 billion in new taxes, most of which fall on the middle class.  Does anyone doubt that this is a huge drag on the economy?

No, Zlotow’s letter is misinformed, proceeding from the false premise that all government spending is good, all regulation is good, all dissent from the current regime is bad.  I’m glad Peter Roskam is in Congress to fight for a smaller, smarter federal government.