AP Factcheck: Obama Living in Fantasyland

Sadly I missed the Obama campaign speech tonight, but thanks to the Associated Press (yes, the AP!) I discover he was completely full of it when he claims his so-called "jobs" plan is paid for.

President Barack Obama's promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.

It will only be paid for if a committee he can't control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future - the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals - don't roll it back.

Underscoring the gravity of the nation's high employment rate, Obama chose a joint session of Congress, normally reserved for a state of the union speech, to lay out his proposals. But if the moment was extraordinary, the plan he presented was conventional Washington rhetoric in one respect: It employs sleight-of-hand accounting.

If we had a president dedicated to his job, we wouldn't be in such a mess. If we elect a real president next year, expect the economy to take off.

OBAMA: "Everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything."

THE FACTS: Obama did not spell out exactly how he would pay for the measures contained in his nearly $450 billion American Jobs Act, but said he would send his proposed specifics in a week to the new congressional supercommittee charged with finding budget savings. White House aides suggested that new deficit spending in the near-term to try to promote job creation would be paid for in the future - the "out years," in legislative jargon - but they did not specify what would be cut or what revenues they would use.

Essentially, the jobs plan is an IOU from a president and lawmakers who may not even be in office down the road when the bills come due. Today's Congress cannot bind a later one for future spending. A future Congress could simply reverse it.

That's all you need to know. He's not serious, cannot be taken seriously and is seriously in over his head. This was a campaign speech, pure and simple, and he wasted everyone's time.