Politics

Obama's Jobs Bill: "An infernal mish-mash of taxes, subsidies, and regulations."

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Richard Epstein, the distinguished legal scholar and former University of Chicago law school colleague of Barack Obama, is no fan of the president's recently proposed American Jobs Act:

What is so striking about Obama's shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

Read the whole piece here. Watch Epstein discuss his former colleague with Reason.tv below: