Telling people to "Get a job!" on one hand, while telling businesses to "Stop creating jobs!" on the other, and then blaming the unemployed for their jobless state sounds more than a little contradictory. If an individual person managed all three, practically in the same breath, you'd think they'd lost their minds.
The contradiction, and utter absence of logic, is painfully obvious. It just doesn't makes sense. No same person would carry on this way. Only a crazy person would behave like this. But what about a political party?
For a party going into an election in the middle of a recession and an unemployment crisis, faced with an opponent touting his own job creation plan and desperate to distract from its own joke of a jobs plan? It might just be crazy enough to work.
Republicans can be forgiven for hoping so. Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler not only debunks as "ludicrous" the GOP's claims that their plan will create 5 million jobs., but points out that it comes off as a joke of a plan when compared to the presidents American Jobs Act. [Via DailyKos.]
Moira Bagley, a spokesman for Paul, said the figure was derived from three proposals: individual and corporate tax cuts that reduced the top tax rate of 25 percent, which the Heritage Foundation said would boost employment by 1.6 million jobs over the next decade; a tax holiday allowing U.S. companies to return cash held overseas, which a Chamber of Commerce study said would create 2.9 million jobs in two years; and a study by energy consultant Wood MacKenzie, which said allowing access to domestic energy resources and imports of Canadian oil would generate more than 1 million jobs by 2018.
There are several problems with these figures.
I'd say relying on the Heritage Foundation to crunch the number is a big problem, but the Republican plan has got even bigger problems, according to Kessler.
The 5 million figure cited by Paul, and echoed by other Republicans, is ludicrous. Even if one accepts the studies that came up with the figures, in most cases they indicate the GOP proposals would do little to create jobs in the near future.
Suddenly, all that odd behavior makes sense, if it distracts people from looking too closely at a joke of a jobs plan that's truly no laughing matter.
