House Republican Leader John Boehner (OH) issued the following statement in advance of President Obama’s “jobs speech” tomorrow at the Brookings Institution:

“Last week, at the White House jobs summit, President Obama acknowledged that the private sector, not government, is the key to creating jobs and getting our economy moving again. Republicans agree. It was less than ten months ago that President Obama signed into law a trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ that was supposed to create jobs ‘immediately’ and keep unemployment below eight percent. Instead, more than three million Americans have lost their jobs and unemployment has climbed to double-digits. Even the accounting methods by which the government judges the merits of the ‘stimulus’ – the fictitious ‘saved or created’ metric - has been widely discredited.

“It would be a giant step backwards if the President were to use his speech to propose more of the same big-government ‘stimulus’ spending that hasn’t worked. Equally troubling is the Democrats’ push for using TARP to ‘pay for’ government programs, which would just be more deficit spending in another form. TARP is not a slush fund to bail out politicians. Taxpayer money paid back to the government should be used for deficit reduction. Period.

“The ‘jobs speech’ President Obama really needs to give is the one he won’t: one that calls on Congress to scrap the job-killing health care and energy tax bills that are slowly making their way to his desk, forcing employers large and small to hold off on hiring decisions, freezing the job market at the worst possible time.

“The American people are asking ‘where are the jobs?’ but all they have gotten from Washington Democrats is more spending, more government, and more debt. We have tried this approach for nearly a year now, and by Washington Democrats’ own standards, it isn’t working. Republicans have offered common-sense solutions all year long. President Obama should seize this opportunity to begin working with Republicans to implement fiscally responsible solutions that help small businesses create jobs and get our economy moving again.”