I didn’t get around to commenting on President Obama’s latest attempt to get the economy going until now because (1) more important things were going on, (2) it seemed like an exercise in futility, and,  by the way, (3) the bill that Obama wants passed didn’t exist.

Waiting a few days meant that at least there now is an actual bill. The bill did not improve from concept to introduction, but it did get more expensive, from $300 billion, Obama claimed, Thursday to $447 billion Monday.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty asked a few inconvenient questions Friday:

I didn’t think this was the worst speech Obama gave. It’s not even that all of the ideas in it are all that terrible. It’s just that they’re reheated leftovers, reruns, small-ball initiatives that are likely to be as effective as every other stimulus program that repaves sidewalks or funds research on exotic ants. We’re a $14 trillion economy that makes everything from timber to jumbo jets to firearms to smart-phone apps to Hollywood movies to every food product under the sun. The notion that some grab bag of tax credits and federal grants is going to kick-start a hiring binge to put 14 million Americans back to work or that the economy is one tax credit for hiring veterans away from recovery is laughable.

The recession we’ve endured for the past three years is far from normal, and yet we keep getting the normal Keynesian responses. I realize I’m about to offer blasphemies and shockers on par with Rick Perry’s Ponzi-scheme comparison, but what if Obama was wrong last night, and a big issue is that some of the people of this country do not, in fact, work hard to meet their responsibilities? What if decades of a lousy education system have left us with a workforce that has too many members with no really useful skills for a globalized economy? What if way too many college students majored in liberal arts and are entering the workforce looking for jobs that will never exist? What if the massive housing bubble got Americans to condition themselves to work in an economy that’s never coming back? (How many realtors are unemployed right now?) What if we have good workers who can’t move to take new jobs because they’re underwater on their mortgages and can’t sell their house?

… How many Americans can argue that we indisputably provide the best value as an employee compared to any other group of workers in the world? Are we still the smartest? Are we still the hardest-working? Are we still the most innovative?

Instead, [Thursday] night we were assured that “tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires” were preventing us from “put[ting] teachers back to work so our kids can graduate ready for college and good jobs.” Sigh. As Michael Barone scored it, “Straw men took a terrible beating from the president.”

A lot of people liked this succinct Yuval Levin assessment: “Spend $450 billion dollars now, it will create jobs, and I’ll tell you how I’m going to pay for it a week from Monday. If you disagree, you want to expose kids to mercury. That about sums up the Obama years.”

The difference between the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of early 2009 and the American Jobs Act is about $340 billion. Criticism of Stimulus I was mostly in two camps: (1) it wasn’t going to work, or (2) it wasn’t large enough. If the second camp was correct, then a smaller Stimulus II isn’t going to work either.

The first camp would include those who noticed in retrospect that the term “shovel-ready” applied to almost nothing besides the U.S. 41 project between Neenah and Oshkosh.  That group also would point out the number of units of government that, two years after ARRA became law, had to make substantial budget cuts (such as this state) because those one-time payments were indeed one-time payments.

Moreover, the minimal tax cuts designed to compel employers to hire aren’t likely to work. Employers hire employees because the employer has business that needs to be done. With the economy still sluggish at best, employers aren’t going to hire more people than they need to conduct today’s business, regardless of tax cuts.

Commentary’s Jim Pethokoukis has another inconvenient observation:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was Barack Obama’s signature achievement in dealing with the most worrisome set of economic conditions since the Great Depression. It was how Obama, to use a pair of his now seemingly abandoned metaphors, sought to drag the economy out of the ditch while the Republicans were standing around sipping Slurpees.

As Obama said on the first anniversary of signing the bill, “It is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second Depression is no longer a possibility.” Economic analysis from the White House credits the Recovery Act with having saved or created between 2.4 million and 3.6 million jobs by the end of March, 2011. …

But Republicans have a competing argument. Instead of saving us from a Greater Depression, the Obama stimulus (together with his health-care plan and financial reforms) was a two-year waste of precious time and money that may actually have impeded economic growth. The evidence for their proposition comes in part from the White House itself; its own economists predicted the stimulus would prevent the unemployment rate from hitting 8 percent. But the rate actually rose as high as 10.1 percent, has settled in above 9 percent now, and even Obama’s own team currently hopes for a rate of, at best, 8.25 percent by the end of 2012—if nothing else goes wrong.

To be sure, the economic disaster that led to the longest recession the United States has ever suffered was something Obama inherited, but there is no question everyone (on all sides of the aisle) believed that natural cyclical forces would have led to recovery long before now. Natural cyclical forces were not given a chance to work themselves out. Far from it. In addition, Republicans can argue that regulatory uncertainty and fear over the rising national debt—debt that Obama’s Recovery Act helped intensify—have chilled American business. …

Economist Brian Wesbury of First Trust Portfolios thinks the huge increase in government spending under the Obama and Bush administrations has hurt the economy. Cutting it back would boost growth. His economic model suggests that without the large increase in government spending that occurred in recent years, “real GDP would be 3.2 percent larger today than it is, the unemployment rate would be 7.6 percent, the U.S. would have 2.5 million more jobs, and the stock market would be 24 percent higher.” …

Did Obama make it worse? It is certainly the case that he only deepened a long-term trend that threatens American prosperity more than any other. The events of 2008–2009 exposed a truth about the U.S. economy from which we had shielded ourselves: economic growth has been slowing in a worrisome way throughout the decade. The nation’s GDP has averaged 3.3 percent annual growth for the past half century. But from 2001 to 2007—before the recession hit—it averaged only 2.6 percent. Going forward, growth might be even slower due to the aftermath of the financial crisis and the aging of the population. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance, pegs long-term growth at just 2 percent or so.

But that downshift isn’t fated. The McKinsey Global Institute thinks a higher retirement age and smarter immigration policy could make the labor force grow more quickly, while smarter tax and regulatory policy could boost worker productivity. Replacing the income tax with a consumption tax, for instance, would likely make the economy grow faster over the long run by increasing investment.

The other absurdity was Obama’s claim that Stimulus II was fully paid for. It was “paid for” only in the sense that the deficit supercommittee, tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts, was going to have to find nearly $2 trillion in cuts, since Obama just added the Stimulus II cost to the supercommittee’s task. I of course was and am skeptical that the supercommittee will find that $1.5 trillion, and if that’s the case it certainly won’t be able, politically speaking, to find another $447 billion.

But Monday the Obama administration had an answer: Increase taxes (by eliminating tax breaks) on single people making more than $200,000, families making more than $250,000, oil companies and hedge funds. Obama’s speech Thursday suggested it’s crazy to increase taxes during a recession, and yet the American Jobs Act increases taxes during a recession, apparently to assuage the class warrior now residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.