WASHINGTON — There are two bits of jobs-related news from Capitol Hill today:
First, the House of Representatives passed the first bill of the GOP’s regulation repeals agenda. The bill would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from forcing companies to relocate, shut down or move employment for any reason. Minnesota’s House delegation voted down party lines (except for the absent Michele Bachmann).
The legislation, which originated in Minnesota Republican John Kline’s Education and the Workforce Committee, was spurred by a highly controversial NLRB complaint against Boeing that the airline manufacturer violated labor laws by opening production lines in the right-to-work state of South Carolina instead of in Washington state. The complaint alleged the company was punishing its unionized Washington workers.
“Today, the House of Representatives sent a strong message to the American people: We will not stand by while the NLRB destroys jobs and wreaks havoc on our economy,” Kline said in a statement. “The president has had many opportunities to hold this activist board accountable, but he has failed to do so. No government board should tell a private employer where to open a business and hire workers.”
The bill is the first in a string of 10 that House Republicans will take up in order to reduce government regulations and spur private sector job growth. Many of those measures — including this one — face a steep climb in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
As the House was voting, Speaker John Boehner explained the Republican jobs plan in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington D.C.
Boehner said there are a few fundamental things threatening job growth in the United States — government regulation, overspending and an outdated tax code.
Republicans have opposed tax increases in connection with both President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs package and Congress’s session-long focus on reducing the federal debt.
Boehner said tax increases — which he said includes letting the Bush-era tax cuts expire — should be off the table for the debt “super committee,” which must craft a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction plan Congress can pass before the end of the year.
“Tax increases are not a viable option for the Joint Committee,” he said. “It’s a very simple equation. Tax increases destroy jobs. And the Joint Committee is a jobs committee. Its mission is to reduce the deficit that is threatening job creation in our country. We should not make its task harder by asking it to do things that will make the environment for job creation in America even worse.”
That “Joint Committee is a jobs committee” motif extended through the rest of Boehner’s speech, with the House speaker contending reduced government spending would lead to greater stability for private sector job growth.
“If the Joint Committee does its work correctly — addressing the structural problems in our entitlement programs that have put us in danger of more job-destroying [credit] downgrades, and setting the stage for fundamental tax reform that will help to support private investment — it will have begun to remove some of the biggest barriers to job creation that exist in our country today,” he said.
Beyond the debt committee, Boehner touched on the Republican’s regulation agenda (details here) and encouraged Obama to begin repealing regulations himself, like he did earlier this month by blocking the implementation of an Environmental Protection Agency regulation on smog estimated to cost up to $90 billion a year.
“I would also urge the president to call a Cabinet meeting, and tell every member of his Cabinet: ‘Until further notice, I don’t want anything that gets in the way of private-sector job creation. And I want you to report back to me in a month with how you’ve done,’ ” Boehner said. “The members of the president’s Cabinet are not doing their jobs if they aren’t constantly focused on removing impediments to job growth. If they’re not focused on that, they should be fired.”
(Note: A previous verison of this story incorrectly stated the nature of the NLRB’s complaint against Boeing. It has been corrected.)
“London police said Thursday they had arrested 31-year-old Kweku Adoboli, a trader at UBS AG, in connection with alleged unauthorized trades that caused a loss of some $2 billion at the bank.”
Dear MinnPost, please run this UBS story right next to the one about how Republicans Hate Regulation. Than run Kline’s photo right next to Adoboli’s, so in a few months we’ll remember who’s to blame.
MinnPost, please run a picture of the vacant lot in South Carolina right next to one of Boeing’s new plant in Germany so we’ll know what we’ve lost.
No, they are not relocating out of the country, but many others have.
The NLRB complaint against Boeing is just the sort of thing that run companies off our shores.
Kline’s bill is a much needed prescription to a malignant government bureaucracy run for the sole benefit of unions.
The only thing more outrageous than the federal government telling a company it can’t move jobs to another state, are the democrat politicians who refuse to stop it.
I like #1’s idea better.
This propagandistic piece of garbage dreamed up by the elitists of the right is a continuation of the right’s war on working people going right back to the execreble Taft-Hartley Act. It was that law which created loopholes in the NLRA to allow these laughably named “right to work laws” which Boeing was seeking to exploit by building its plant in SC, an anti-union right to work state. The even more laughable thing about the “right to work laws” is that even these laws haven’t stopped the outward migration of jobs to countries that allow slave labor conditions. There is no limit to the greed of the wealthy in this country. You’d think that an intelligent and honest approach to job creating policies by Congress would address the real source of the problem. But no. Right wing laps dogs like Boehner and Kline are too busy soaking up “campaign contributions” from the wealthy who are getting wealthier by sending these jobs overseas to do anything about that. Better come up with some babble about “overregulation” and fool the rubes again.
And if any American company wants to take their factories overseas, tax the hell out of any products they try to bring back into the country. And forbid them from any government contracts. Or any tax breaks or subsidies of any type.
The issue isn’t freedom of capital. The issue is whether employers can use a threat to move production to a union-hostile state as a negotiating tactic in collective bargaining.
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Regulations are laws meant to prevent companies or individuals from performing damaging actions. There is no difference between a law preventing me from going downtown and shooting my gun in the air, and a regulation preventing a company from dumping toxic material into the ground. Both are meant to prevent harm to the common citizen.
Now, like laws such as blue laws, not all regulations are necessary. But to broadly say that all regulations are bad, and too simply cut any regulation that a company finds annoying is a dangerous game to play.
More importantly such a gambit could, in the long run, be costly. Indeed it was lack of enforcement of existing regulations, as well as not creating new regulations regarding new technologies that were a large part responsible for creating the economic mess we are in.
“Right wing laps dogs like Boehner and Kline are too busy soaking up “campaign contributions””
Are they lap dogs, or elitists, Jon? Inconsistent and/or conflicting invective makes it difficult for the thoughtful reader to keep up with the intended ad hominum slur.
“Ad hominem slur” or truth? It’s a well known phenomenon that house servants, like butlers, identify with their masters to feel superior to the field servants, like gardeners who do the heavy lifting. It’s hardly inconsistent to point out that the analogy applies to Kline and Boehnert, among others, who act as highly paid help for the wealthy elite and unquestioningly do their bidding, regardless of the consequences to us “field servants” who do the heavy lifting.
How long will it take, I wonder, for the anti-tax zealots to notice that the “risk takers” and “job creators” don’t like to take risks unless they are protected from loss by the taxpayer AND have moved tens of thousands of jobs to foreign countries without environmental regulations and with no requirement to pay their workers a living wage.
High corporate taxes?? Hardly. Not if you find plenty of ways to avoid paying them, as most of our top corporations do.
MinnPost–please run an article on the recent MacClatchy newspaper survey of businesses that showed (to their surprise) that small businesses DO NOT feel that they are overregulated, and are also willing to pay more taxes, given the current state of the economy.
Lack of available credit seems to be the biggest impediment to job creation.
A nice chart showing by year the increase/decrease in business tax cuts and the increase/decrease in private sector jobs created/eliminated might also be helpful to this discussion.
According to the SBA, 80% of new jobs were created by small businesses under Pres. Clinton, fell to 60% under Pres. Bush.
In short Boehner–you’ve been cutting taxes to create jobs. How’s that working for ya?