Republicans Have Plans To Create Job Growth

House Minority Leader John Boehner (Congress' top Republican) today, when asked what the Republican party would do to stimulate job growth, responded with a 3-pronged strategy:

"The first thing I would do is repeal Obamacare," Boehner said at the Christian Science Monitor luncheon. "It is a giant impediment for employment. Not only will it ruin the best health care system in the world, it will bankrupt our country."

So plan #1 to stimulate the economy to create jobs is to repeal legislation that is not even operational yet.

"Secondly, no cap and trade," Boehner added. "You raise the cost of energy, you raise the cost of doing business."

So plan #2 to stimulate the economy to create jobs is to never enact legislation that has never been enacted.

"Thirdly, not raise people's taxes," he concluded. "You want to get the economy going, give some people certainty about what the tax rates are going to be."

So plan #3 to stimulate the economy to create jobs is to leave taxes the way they are.

To summarize, the Republicans will create jobs by:
Plan #1: Stopping a program that hasn't begun yet.
Plan #2: Blocking legislation that doesn't exist yet.
Plan #3: Not raising taxes.

Andrew Sullivan summed it up so well today:

Long ago, this was my basic assumption about the immediate future of the GOP. They could not cognitively handle that they had supported an administration that spent like left-liberals, poured trillions into nation-building in failed states, fought a war on dramatically false pretenses, authorized illegal torture by presidential decree, lost a major US city, and turned a surplus into a spiraling deficit, leaving no wriggle room for when a storm like the financial collapse of 2008 occurred. So they simply went into denial, and blamed everything on the person who inherited this catastrophe.

Reduced to a purer rump based in the South, they reinforced their worst tendencies, as parties often do after losing elections in landslides. They became more anti-illegal immigrant, they chanted slogans about "liberty or tyranny" rather than offering proposals to solve our many problems, they became older and whiter and angrier. And because of the enduring recession and a centrist attempt to find a way for working poor to afford health insurance, they blamed all their woes on a black communist, taking from whites and giving to minorities. And from this strong elixir, they gained an appearance of strength. They may well do well this fall as a protest vote.

But what then?

That's the sad question: The Republicans have gotten everybody angry and riled up, but as illustrated above, they don't have any coherent plan to fix the problems that America is currently facing. Really: If the Republicans had a jobs bill or their own economic stimulus program or their own financial reform or their own social welfare ideas, don't you think that the #1 Republican, when asked about how his party was going to stimulate the economy, would have trotted out some of them instead of saying (essentially), "We won't raise taxes"?

It's the politics of contrarianism, and it's just terrible that it is actually working.