"Recovery Summer" One Year Later

Last week marked exactly one year since President Obama declared the summer of 2010 to be "Recovery Summer" -- the season, so we were told, when his $787 billion "stimulus" plan would finally start creating jobs. In urging passage of his plan, the president insisted the stimulus would ensure the unemployment rate would not exceed 8 percent and predicted that the jobless rate would be 6.8 percent by now.

As we all know, these promises never materialized. The "Recovery Summer" unemployment rate turned out to be 9.7 percent, and it remains at 9.1 percent today. The U.S. economy has lost 1.9 million jobs since passage of the stimulus.

It is time to acknowledge that government spending is not the solution to our high jobless rate. In fact, it is the problem, and job creators know it. A host of recent indicators show that employers are discouraged and pessimistic. One new survey from the National Federation of Independent Business found that more business owners expect to decrease their payrolls than expect to expand. One-third of those surveyed cite "taxes" or "government requirements" as factors in their difficulties.

Only 5 percent of owners consider the current period a good time to grow their businesses, and a net negative 5 percent of owners expect better business conditions to occur in six months.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” said one business owner quoted in the New York Times, adding that there is "no chance" he will hire additional workers any time soon.

House Republicans understand the crushing burden imposed on job creators by overregulation and the uncertainty created by the nation's debt. Since the current legislative session began, we have passed a series of bills to alleviate these burdens. Our first order of business in January was passing a bill to repeal Obamacare, that costly misadventure cited time and again by businesses as one of the primary barriers to their expansion and even their survival.

In February, the House approved a resolution directing committees to review any existing, pending, and proposed government regulations to assess their effect on jobs and economic growth. In April, we passed a bill to give small businesses relief from the paperwork headache imposed by Obamacare's new IRS reporting requirements. The Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act will reduce taxes by $24.7 billion over ten years and save businesses untold sums of wasted hours and money trying to comply with the onerous regulation.

In May, we passed three bills to reverse the president's disastrous efforts to prevent American energy exploration. The Obama administration's ban on drilling has cost 12,000 Gulf Coast jobs already, but the Republican legislation to jumpstart domestic energy production would create jobs and help reduce energy costs for American families and businesses.

All of the jobs bills are reinforced by the Republican commitment to spending cuts and debt reduction. We passed a budget for 2011 that cuts $78.5 billion from the president's request. The budget we approved for 2012 cuts $6.2 trillion over 10 years, makes sensible reforms to rescue Medicare from bankruptcy, and cuts entitlement spending, which consumes 60 percent of the federal budget and represents the single largest driver of our $14.2 trillion debt. Additionally, House Republicans defeated a bill that would have raised the debt ceiling without cutting spending.

As negotiations over the debt ceiling continue, the president and congressional Democrats continue to push for the same tired economic policies, insisting that tax increases are the way to a balanced budget. One year after "Recovery Summer," there is overwhelming evidence that tax-and-spend policies are a failure. It is time for government to scale back and get out of the way of economic growth.