Frequent White House visitor comes out of two year coma

As Porkulus turned 2 years old a week and a half ago, how else do you explain the following?

What's the best way to get Americans back to work?

Raise taxes, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Specifically, he wants to raise the federal gas tax as a means to fund infrastructure spending. "We need a dedicated source of revenue to create infrastructure in this country," he tells Aaron Task in the accompanying clip.

"We need to create jobs. The best way to do that is through infrastructure development." Simply maintaining the existing infrastructure in this country will cost $2.2 trillion over five years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. That doesn't include Obama's objective of high-speed rails and green energy projects

The complete lack of self-awareness is stunning as it's unfathomable to us that these people don't realize they have been essentially saying the same thing for two years now with no real favorable impact to the economy.

Trumka didn't say specifically how much he would raise the gas tax, but mentioned he's shown the President a $256 billion plan to improve infrastructure. If every billion spent on infrastructure creates 35,000 jobs, as he claims, this package would create close to 9 million jobs over the next five years.

If $256 billion for inftrastructure sounds familiar to regular readers of this blog it should because it's a dollar figure just $30 billion shy of the pork-laden $286 billion Highway Bill signed into law by President Bush just 6 years ago.

Here's what Bush said about it at the signing ceremony back in 2005:

"If we want people working in America, we got to make sure our highways and roads are modern,…We've got to bring up this transportation system into the 21st century."

So, obviously it's not a Democrat/Republican thing as infrastructure upgrades/employment-boosting via Keynesian economics talking points get issued to both sides of the aisle as well as to the union bosses.

Need to learn some new lyrics, fellas, as people may get wise to you wanting to spend money we don't have on boondoggles like high-speed rail and shovel-ready projects that just aren't that shovel-ready.