AT's political correspondent Rich Baehr has an excellent piece up at Pajamas Media this morning that correctly identifies the ridiculous strawman arguments made by the president in his speech last night: About half of the money in the program announced tonight relates to continuation of existing programs that were due to expire - the 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, and the 2% payroll tax cut for workers. In other words, they do not represent new money thrown into the economy, but simply not taking money out of it. This is very similar to the extension of the Bush tax cuts passed by the lame duck Congress in December 2010. Clearly that extension, the extension of unemployment benefits that was also passed at that time, and the 2% payroll tax cut that was created at that time have done very little to create new jobs in 2011. Zero jobs were created in August, a pathetic performance for an economy more than two years into the weakest recovery in a century. The reality is that the...(Read Full Post)