Cornyn Op-Ed: Obama's Economic Plan Continues Tepid Recovery

‘We cannot spend our way back to full employment, and we cannot tax away our long-term debt problem.’

Aug 09 2013

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) authored the following op-ed today in the Houston Chronicle:

Obama's Economic Plan Continues Tepid Recovery
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn
Houston ChronicleAugust 9, 2013
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Cornyn-Obama-s-economic-plan-continues-tepid-4718080.php

In a pair of recent speeches, President Barack Obama outlined his second-term economic agenda.

At Knox College in Illinois, he declared that income inequality is a bigger problem than slow GDP growth and mass unemployment. At an Amazon.com facility in Tennessee, he proposed raising the corporate-tax burden and using the new revenue to fund more of his favorite stimulus projects.

In other words, President Obama wants us to pretend that the last four and a half years never happened.

Listening to his speeches, you would never know that America's median household income has declined by nearly $2,400 since June of 2009. You would never know that 4.2 million people have been unemployed for more than six months. You would never know that our labor-force participation rate is much lower today than it was during the recession. You would never know that this administration has already raised taxes by $1.7 trillion. You would never know that President Obama has increased our national debt by $6.1 trillion. And you would never know that the federal government still has more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

If raising taxes, raising spending, and stoking class warfare represented the path to prosperity, our economy would be booming. Instead, we've been suffering through the weakest recovery and the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Depression. That's the real Obama record. 

Unfortunately, rather than use his two recent speeches as an opportunity to champion genuine bipartisan growth initiatives, the President chose to caricature his political opponents as anti-government fanatics - people who don't want to invest in basic R&D, transportation infrastructure, or children's education.

It reminded me of a press conference back in January, where the president suggested that certain unnamed Republicans don't really care about poor kids, the elderly or medical research.

Here's the reality: Supporting basic R&D is different from supporting crony capitalism and Solyndra-style boondoggles.

Likewise, supporting basic infrastructure is different from supporting Bridges to Nowhere, Trains to Nowhere, and other economically backward pork-barrel projects.

When it comes to education, Republicans realize the best way to help America's failing schools is through reforms that promote greater parental choice, higher academic standards, and more accountability. What we don't support is simply throwing money at a problem and declaring it solved.

As for the social safety net, Republicans strongly support programs that aid and protect the most vulnerable members of our society. What we don't support is creating new entitlement programs like Obamacare and massively expanding existing programs like Medicaid, which is already broken and already failing the neediest Americans.

Amazingly, the president still seems to believe that we can tax and spend our way back to robust job creation.

Along with many other Democrats, he is now trying to use "tax reform" as a vehicle for yet another massive tax increase.

Last month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that tax reform "can't be even close to revenue-neutral."

Ever since 1986, when a supermajority of 97 U.S. senators joined forces to overhaul our tax code, the bipartisan consensus on tax reform has been pretty simple: You lower the rates and broaden the base. That makes the tax system more logical, more efficient, and more conducive to economic growth. 

In fact, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (Max Baucus) and the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (Dave Camp) have spent the last several months working on revenue-neutral, pro-growth tax reform.

And yet, President Obama and Senator Reid have decided to sabotage their efforts.

We cannot spend our way back to full employment, and we cannot tax away our long-term debt problem. 

The sooner President Obama and Democrats accept that, the sooner we'll be able to implement the long-overdue reforms that are needed to save our economy, save our entitlement programs, and save the American Dream.