President Obama’s latest “pivot” to jobs and the economy has so far consisted of two speeches in which he extolled scant evidence of growth, condemned Republican opposition to his policies and proposed a “grand bargain.” That grand bargain essentially consists of Obama’s idea of tax reform, which means higher taxes on the rich, and Republicans agreeing to let Obama spend the resulting revenue on expanding government programs and regulations. The chief executive would likely feel grand if Republicans were dumb enough to go for such a misnamed deal, but there is clearly no bargain in it for American taxpayers.

The problem with Obama’s gambit is that it is neither grand nor a bargain. It’s not new, either. Obama took the country down this same road of using massive government spending to boost the economy back in 2009 with his $845 billion economic stimulus program. As Peter Ferrara explained last week in Forbes, five years later, it’s clear that program failed, as the economy still hasn’t regained all of the jobs lost during the previous recession and growth remains essentially stagnant: “Taxing or borrowing a trillion dollars out of the private sector to spend a trillion dollars in the public sector is not going to increase jobs or economic growth overall on net. At best, it will just shift jobs from where the market directs to where the government directs. More likely, it will be a net drag on the economy, because the market spends money more productively and efficiently than the government.”