Against my better judgment, I watched part of President Obama’s jobs speech last week. Having followed the political process since the 1980s, I am usually pretty unimpressed by Presidential addresses. The policy proposals usually just anger me and there is little in the way of outstanding rhetoric to redeem the speeches. President Obama’s speech didn’t do anything to change my low expectations.

As is usual with economic policy proposals from presidents of both parties, President Obama wants to provide incentives and punishments so that buyers and sellers do what politicians want them to do. Often, though, these incentives and punishments are ineffective. They distort the economy in ways that politicians don’t want and have a variety of unintended consequences.

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute has a good take on the variety of bad ideas contained in his speech at the Cato@Liberty blog. As Edwards points out, a number of the things President Obama suggested were expansion of federal programs that don’t work. For instance, federal jobs training programs don’t do much good. As the Government Accountability Office found, “little is known about the effectiveness of employment and training programs [GAO] identified.”

Does the ineffectiveness of job training programs matter to politicians? Probably not. In DC, it’s far more important that the program have a good intention than that the program actually be effective. Rhetoric in DC is far more important than reality. The President has proposed a jobs plan, he has shown he cares, and it’s unlikely that many people will follow up to see if his plan actually works.

In fact, it will be difficult to tell if his plan boosts the economy or not. There are so many variables that go into economic growth that the addition of a tax cut here or a spending boost there is almost impossible to isolate. In the absence of any proof that these measures work, though, the best thing to do is not to expand them but to eliminate them. We should have results-based government – a program needs to be proven effective before it gets further funding. If you are going to justify expanding a government program, you need to be prepared to prove it will do what you say.

I wonder how many government programs would pass this kind of test. Anyone want to venture a guess?