Democrats are planning to push “Job Creation” this election season.

Yeah, we’ve heard that one before. Right before the massive, do-nothing stimulus package was passed. The same stimulus package that now has to be paid for–with job-killing tax hikes.

Yet Democrats are poised to make this election about jobs:

A retooled jobs initiative, which Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) on Tuesday dubbed the “Make It in America” agenda, will be front and center for Democrats hoping to have something positive to take home during the August break.

With the unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent and the bulk of the House Democratic agenda stalled in the Senate, rank-and-file Members have been clamoring for leadership to refocus their attention on jobs. Lawmakers want to be able to demonstrate that they are working to aid the manufacturing sector and keep American jobs from being shipped overseas.

Here’s a news flash for the Democrats: It doesn’t matter how many incentives you provide. As long as you keep raising taxes, companies are going to ship jobs overseas.

The inescapable fact is that companies are in the business to make money. They make money by selling products for more money than it costs to make them. Taxes are a cost. Increasing taxes increases costs. So corporations that can afford to do so will invest in places where taxes (and hence, costs) are lower.

The Democrats seem to believe in a fantasy world where the cost of labor, taxes and regulatory compliance continue to increase, but companies make more money.

Sure, there are 305 million people in the United States. As the nations go, we’re educated, productive and affluent. Somebody will have to provide the goods and services Americans need. Raise taxes and increase costs like mandating health insurance and creating excessive regulatory paperwork and more and more of those goods will be coming from overseas instead of the United States.

The Democrats are offering a pittance of incentives to encourage businesses to keep jobs in America, but those incentives pale in comparisson to the increased cost of taxes to pay for all those incentives, and those taxes will invariably affect small businesses, large corporations and yes, individual wage earners.

So the political class in Washington has a choice: They can continue to spend greater and greater sums of money from the Treasury, requiring more borrowing and tax increases that stifle economic growth and job creation, or they can end the self-destructive slide into fiscal oblivion by reducing spending, slashing deficits and cutting taxes.

Democrats can try to sell themselves as job creators, but the past 18 months have educated America to the truth: Centralized government direction is not an effective tool at stimulating economic growth and creating jobs. Only the power of the free market, unleashed and unfettered by punishing taxes and regulation, can do that.