The American Jobs Act, Paid In Full

The Congressional Budget Office does confirm that President Obama's repeated claims that the American Jobs Act is fully paid are very much correct.

The Congressional Budget Office on Friday confirmed that President Obama’s jobs bill would be fully paid for over ten years and also gave its seal of approval to Senate Democrats' version that includes a surtax on millionaires.

The CBO said that the original Obama stimulus bill would involve $447 billion in tax cuts and new spending—the same estimate given by the administration. It said the bill would raise $450 billion over ten years. The result is a $3 billion decrease in deficits over ten years.

The Senate Democrats' bill, which replaces Obama’s taxes on the upper middle class with a 5.6 percent surtax on those with annual incomes above $1 million, raises $453 billion over ten years and reduces deficits by $6 billion. The tax kicks in in 2013.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office highlighted that the CBO affirmed 60 percent of the stimulus comes in the form of tax cuts rather than spending and that most of the tax relief is for workers.

Republicans are now ignoring the bill because it does add to the short-term deficit by $288 billion.  Mitch McConnell says the Senate Dems' millionaire tax is a "deal-killer" and was never going to vote for it anyway, I assume that as his constituent, he's fine with Kentucky's 9.5% unemployment rate and the fact that Kentucky's been above the national unemployment average every month since January 2005.   You'd think Mitch would want to do more.  You'd be wrong, of course.

Deficits only matter when there's a Democrat in the White House.