You can tell it's a slow summer news day when the top story is that President Barack Obama is going to make a speech. Even more redundant and meaningless, his speech is going to focus on jobs and won't occur until next month. According to a senior administration official, the speech will lay out new ideas for job growth and helping the poor and middle class. But to quote a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), "We really don’t need another speech - just a plan, like, on paper."

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It's easy to understand the frustration with a president who keeps promising plans, ideas and laser-like focus on the nation's dismal jobs market but delivers nothing but speeches and job-killing policies. It's also difficult to reconcile his repeated statements that things beyond our government's control (Japanese tsunamis, Arab springs, etc.) have caused our current economic woes but suddenly a new plan from our government can improve them.

And then there is the timing factor. If this administration is truly capable of coming up with a real plan that will "lay out new ideas for job growth and helping the poor and middle class," then why has it taken over two and a half years of long-term, sky-high unemployment for these ideas to suddenly appear?

So we are left with the most likely possibility that this upcoming speech will be nothing more than what we have come to expect from President Obama - blaming others for his failures and offering nothing of substance in the way of solutions. As with the 'budget framework' he outlined in an April speech, the Congressional Budget Office will not be able to estimate the viability of the ideas in this one because, as CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf said at that time, "We don't estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis."

Maybe that's what Mr. Obama was counting on when he decided he'll make another speech next month.

But just in case he really has an actual plan this time, again in the words of Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck, "Seriously, just drop it in the mail. Podium not required."