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The House Republicans have developed a track record of bait and switch when it comes to their approach to job creation.
 
Last week, House Republican leadership released a PowerPoint by Congressman Paul Ryan that they are using to educate the Republican Caucus on their top policy priorities. Ryan laid out the “Jobs Deficit” as the number one challenge facing America in his very first slide. Yet he failed to focus on jobs until the very last slide, which reads: “Keep taxes low; spur job creation and growth.” Not quite the robust plan we need to put millions of Americans back to work.
 
Today Darell Issa tweeted a new Congressional GOP website, AmericanJobCreators.com-- a site which implies a focus on job creation. The site consists of a form in which business owners can provide feedback to their elected representatives, but it asks just two questions, neither of them dedicated to job creation: “How is government holding your business back?” and “Please indicate the federal government agencies that oversee the regulations identified in your response (check all that apply).” AmericanJobCreators.com? Maybe AmericansAgainstRegulations.com was already taken.  
 
And today’s Forum on Job Creation held at the Capitol Visitors Center by the Republican House leadership was yet another misdirection play by the GOP. Today’s talk was billed as a summit bringing business leaders from across the country together to discuss job creation, but putting people back to work was barely mentioned. Instead, the hour-long session served as a punching bag for regulations and corporate taxes and a PR blitz for the REINS act, which would require agencies to get approval from Congress for all significant regulatory decisions.
 
And they didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good time, either.  Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas asserted that the EPA was now trying to regulate spilt milk on dairy farms as they do for oil spills. This was first declared in an unsigned Wall St Journal editorial and repeated in a newsletter from Congressman H. Morgan Griffith, but the claim has been roundly rebuked as fiction by the EPA and Politifact. But that didn’t stop Hensarling.
 
26:56:
Congressman Hensarling:  It’s almost like you could sell a video tape of bureaucrats gone wild. I wake up and I find out the EPA wants to tell dairy farmers they have to have emergency spill plans like petroleum companies. I mean I heard one farmer, one of my colleagues said, to their dairy farmers, you know we’ve got an emergency plan if we’ve got spilled milk: The emergency plan is this: Here kitty, kitty, kitty. We laugh about it, but that’s a burden on dairy farmers. I have dairy farmers in East Texas. They’re going to now spend money on an emergency plan that’s laughable when they could have been expanding dairy farms and jobs.
 
     
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Progressives last week spent a full day talking about jobs at "The Summit on Jobs and America's Future" at the National Press Club in Washington. Instead of whipped-up frenzy over false or exaggerated regulatory schemes, experts and elected officials discussed concrete federal policies that would lead to the building of a new economy of broad middle-class prosperity. If you missed the summit, you can watch videos of the proceedings at ourfuture.org/jobsummit.

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