The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Two AP Dispatches in One!

  • “AZ Sheriff Arpaio’s Actions Under Ethics Review”–headline, Associated Press, Sept. 12
  • “Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio isn’t the subject of the disciplinary case.”–AP, same dispatch

Is It Even Rated?
“Is Canada Over-Rated?”–headline, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Sept. 13

The Phony War on Unemployment
During his historic address to a joint session of Congress last week, President Obama announced that his $447 billion Stimulus Jr. “jobs” bill “will be paid for.” How? By asking Congress to pay for it!

The agreement we passed in July . . . charges this Congress to come up with an additional $1.5 trillion in savings by Christmas. Tonight, I am asking you to increase that amount so that it covers the full cost of the American Jobs Act.

We thought this was a great idea, so we wrote our congressman and asked her to increase the amount from $1,947,000,000,000 to $1,947,000,500,000. There, now our apartment is paid for!

We didn’t really write our congressman, who we doubt would’ve gotten the joke. But yesterday Obama effectively admitted the claim that the bill was “paid for” was phony. As the Associated Press reports, yesterday “the White House announced plans to pay for the costly measure entirely with tax increases . . . the GOP has already rejected”:

The bulk of the payment comes from nearly $400 billion from limiting the deductions on charitable contributions and other items that wealthy people can take. There’s also $40 billion from closing oil and gas loopholes, $18 billion from hiking taxes on certain income made by fund managers, and $3 billion from changing the tax treatment of corporate jets.

Of course, when this White House says “wealthy,” it includes the merely affluent: Obama considers anyone making more than $200,000 a year to fall into his oft-demonized category of “millionaires and billionaires.” What’s more, Obama is proposing to pay for what are supposed to be temporary spending programs and tax loopholes with permanent increases in taxes.

The real aim of this policy is to increase the proportion of the economy that the government consumes, so as to cement the transformation of America into a European-style welfare state. Or rather, that would be the aim of this policy if it were a real policy. The Republicans who control the House are not going to enact these tax hikes.

Surely even Obama realizes this, having lost three showdowns with Congress–over extending the Bush tax cuts, shutting down the government, and raising the debt ceiling–when Republicans balked at tax hikes.

The AP notes understatedly that Republicans “grew notably more skeptical” when Obama announced his tax-hike plan. They weren’t the only ones. Hyperprogressive former labor secretary Robert Reich, writing at the Puffington Host, loves the idea of taxing the so-called wealthy, but he notes, again with understatement, that Obama’s is “an odd strategy.” After all, “if any Republican was prepared to vote for the jobs bill, this will send him or her scurrying.”

If Congress enacted Stimulus Jr., there would be a serious downside for Obama. If (or when), like Stimulus Sr., it made no discernible dent in the unemployment rate, the president would go into his re-election campaign having wasted over a trillion dollars on empty stimuli. The upside would be that since it could pass only with Republican support, the GOP would share the blame.

That is also one reason why Obama probably wasn’t going to get GOP support for Stimulus Jr. even without the massive tax hikes. His strategy, then, seems to be to make a virtue of necessity. Stimulus Jr. was meant not to be enacted but to be rejected, so that Obama can run against the “do-nothing Congress.”

Reich is still confused, though:

If the president was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place–if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch–why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?

Let’s accept for the sake of argument the creationist premise that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent government can create all the jobs it wants simply by borrowing and spending enough money. Let’s also assume Reich’s premise that “enough,” in this case, is some figure considerably in excess of $447 billion.

Why didn’t Obama ask for enough? That seems obvious. If the answer is “no,” and the point of asking the question is to elicit a negative response, then the practical difference between what you get if you ask for $447 billion and, say, $5 trillion is not $4.553 trillion but zero. If Obama is asking for the money only for appearance’ sake, as Reich concedes he is, then it’s more important that $447 billion appears more reasonable than $5 trillion.

Either way, Megan McArdle wishes “that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.” Most of those viewers–those of us who write about this stuff for a living being obvious exceptions–didn’t actually have to watch the speech, so we’re not able to work up much sympathy for those who didn’t have the good sense to change the channel or go out and live a little.

But let’s take this by the numbers. Obama’s speech lasted about 42 minutes. Multiply that by 31 million viewers and, say, $20 an hour, and you end up with the man-hour equivalent of about $434 million. It’s a shameful waste, but much less of one than if Stimulus Jr. actually became law.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”