Heartland Institute Experts Available to Comment on Obama’s Jobs Speech

Published September 8, 2011

President Obama is expected to ask for some $300 billion in economic stimulus in his speech tonight at a joint session of Congress.

Budget and tax experts at The Heartland Institute are available to provide comments after the president’s speech. Meantime, their statements below may be used for attribution.

To book any of these experts on your program, please refer to the contact information below or contact Heartland’s director of communications, Jim Lakely, at [email protected] and 312/731-9364, or media specialist Tammy Nash at [email protected] and 312/377-4000.


“President Obama tonight will just offer again the same tried, failed and proven-wrong theory that economic growth and recovery is based on increased government spending. What drives economic growth and recovery is incentives for increased production, which Reagan understood so well, but Obama’s leftist ideology won’t allow him to even consider. If any supposed tax cuts do not involve reductions in tax rates, permanent not temporary, they won’t do any good either.

Peter Ferrara
Senior Fellow for Entitlement and Budget Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]

Mr. Ferrara is the author of The Obamacare Disaster (2010) and America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (2011).


“President Obama’s strength has always been speechmaking. The problem he has now is that no amount of talk will reverse the majority of Americans’ opinion that he and the Democrat Congress of his first two years are responsible for the current staggering economy. The public’s hatred of Obamacare is just one of many indications that the president’s course thus far has been a disaster for the economy and the nation as a whole.

“Unless the president makes a firm commitment to reverse course and remove the enormous weight of taxes and regulations he has added to the economy, tonight’s speech will change nothing. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly unlikely that he will do so.”

S.T. Karnick
Director of Research
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000


“We’ve recently seen our government shut down Gibson Guitar Co. with no criminal charges being filed. We’ve seen the National Labor Relations Board try to block Boeing from opening a new aircraft factory in South Carolina. We’ve seen our government shred established bankruptcy law and harm bondholders to take over major automakers and hand partial ownership to labor unions that helped ruin the automakers.

“We’ve seen our government hand corporate welfare to mammoth financial firms to the disadvantage of smaller financial firms and Main Street businesses. We’ve seen laws thousands of pages long enacted with burdensome regulations that will take years to be written. We’ve seen money printed out of thin air and more money borrowed with no concern for future taxpayers who will have to pay it back.

“If President Obama wants to improve the economy and grow the number of jobs, he should consider the fear such actions create and end these practices.”

Steve Stanek
Research Fellow, Budget and Tax Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor
Budget & Tax News
[email protected]


The Heartland Institute is a 27-year-old national nonprofit organization with offices in Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; Austin, Texas; Tallahassee, Florida; and Columbus, Ohio. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.