The American Jobs Act (Obama Jobs Bill) Should be Passed

First, I will provide rebuttals, then explain a counterplan. The Act is clearly not bipartisan. Every Republican US Senator voted against it, even moderates including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins who voted for Obama's 1st stimulus. Payroll tax cuts are a not very efficient way to cut taxes. "It would simply exacerbate our debt problems in my opinion" according to Congressman Paul Ryan. The payroll tax cut is simply another gimmick because it is temporary and demand sided. We had tax incentives similar to these in the first stimulus bill. It was promised that unemployment wouldn't go over 8%. Instead, we've had the longest streak of unemployment since the great depression. These tax gimmicks and temporary tricks don't work. The enormous cost of fixing our roads is exactly why the federal bureaucracy shouldn't be involved. At $2.2 trillion, we can't afford to spend all that money. The infrastructure bank would fix very little, and pork-barrel politicians may divert funding to useless "Bridges to Nowhere." Infrastructure projects from the previous stimulus haven't fixed anything: you mention all the deficiencies: so what makes this new stimulus plan, with even less bipartisan support, any better? 1. Good tax cuts are a solid venue to economic growth. But they need to be focused on those creating the jobs. Demand-side tax cuts are temporary gimmicks. 2. You say that this spending will "revitalize public schools." School spending has increased enormously and class sizes have gone significantly down, but test scores haven't improved. This is because teachers unions are preventing common-sense accountability measures. We need private schools so we can experiment and find the best ways to teach our children, not spend money we don't have and call it "investment". 3. We don't need to spend federal government money at all on infrastructure. The Dulles Greenway was built entirely by private investment. If we streamline regulations to building infrastructure(these regulations are required for all projects, whether public or private), the conditions of our roads would improve because companies want to improve the quality of roads because they are bad for business. 4. Unemployment benefits do make people lazy. People applying for unemployment benefits had employment, but unemployment benefits can cause people to become couch potatoes. The lure of a paycheck for doing nothing can be too much for ordinarily hardworking people. According to JP Morgan Chase, unemployment benefits increased the unemployment rate by 1.5%. Unemployment benefits often are higher than minimum wage jobs, discouraging people from accepting perfectly good entry-level occupations. 5. We do need teachers, firefighters, and police officers, but too many government employees does crowd out private investment, even if they serve a valuable purpose. It would be great to rehire them, but that money will dry up eventually and those people may be fired again. The beauty of a private sector job is that it provides a permanent job for a person at no cost to the taxpayer. 6. School spending should be directed at local levels. The federal government has an innate tendency to waste money, but the innovative local governments can do more with less. 7. These construction jobs will go away when the money dries up. The projects may not even be finished. I am saying that lowering the corporate tax is a better way forward than another stimulus, considering the first one failed. 10. There is a reason employers discriminate against the unemployed during a recession: the best, most-competent people usually don't get laid off. Of course, employers could also see through other credentials that an unemployed person got unlucky. But more regulations leads to a higher overhead for business which leads to less jobs to go around. 11. The top 1% pay 41% of the taxes. They have paid enough. Requiring the top people to pay more is simply class warfare. Half of Americans don't pay federal income taxes. Big government liberals can bribe these people to vote for them, and then steal money from successful people so they can buy votes. In a recession, the WORST thing we can do is raise taxes. It crowds out private investment. My counterplan is simple: -Eliminate the corporate tax($191 billion less revenue) -Streamline regulations(no cost, most likely net increase in revenue) As former governor and financial expert Gary Johnson said, eliminating the corporate tax would create millions of jobs by itself. This would cost much less than the Obama plan, which many are skeptical if it would create any jobs(even liberal estimates say it would only lower the unemployment rate by 1%). We need to CREATE jobs by promoting economic freedom. My opponent never explained how this act is different than the first stimulus. If the 1st one didn't live up to predictions, why will this one? For all these reasons, I urge a Negative ballot.