jonathan-cunningham:

The good news is, House Republicans unveiled a plan yesterday that’s intended to create jobs. The bad news is, the plan can charitably be described as a bad joke.

As we discussed yesterday, the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.

Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.

The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.

There is no circumstance in which the GOP will advocate higher taxes or more regulation, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it’s a necessity. Take Big Oil- Deepwater Horizon proved the need for more regulation and Exxon paying no income taxes in 2009 proved that our tax system was broken. The GOP’s response? More deregulation and lowering taxes- refusing to remove the nonsensically generous tax breaks from oil companies and expanding the area we allow drilling. They are devoted to ideology above pragmatism, and that’s why their candidates are all so pathetic- the moment they set their feet on the ground and start addressing reality, they’re ostracized and ridiculed (see: Newt Gingrich on the Ryan budget).

(via technipol)