The White House has released the full text of President Obama's jobs bill. Obama celebrated his sending of the legislation to Congress in a Rose Garden ceremony Monday morning. Read its 155 pages here.

During the press briefing on Monday afternoon, press secretary Jay Carney brought out director of the Office of Management and Budget Jack Lew to take questions about the cost of the bill. ("It's your lucky day!" said Carney.) The first question was not about dollars and cents but Republican votes in Congress. Here's how that went:

Q:  Jack, I wonder on that one point, though, when you say you’ve overachieved, the very first one you listed with the biggest amount of money, $400 billion, eliminating itemized deductions.  I seem to remember in 2009, in the President’s first budget, that very provision was in there, and you were saying then -- I know you were not OMB chair, but your predecessor was saying that that was going to pay for health care reform.  And you had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, and it went nowhere.  So how are you going to get it done now with a Republican House?
 
MR. LEW:  I think that the merits of the proposal stand on its own.  As the President made clear in the speech last Thursday, and as he’s spoken to the issue subsequently, we have choices to make.  We have -- in order to invest in jobs and growth, we’re going to have to pay for it.  And we’re going to have to look at quite a few things that we’ve looked at before and ask the question, should we do this in order to add to growth and create jobs.

American Jobs Act -- Final

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Elspeth Reeve