It’s encouraging to see the Republicans put forth a jobs bill, but — confound it — the measure as outlined by Senators Portman, DeMint, Paul, Jordan, and McCain is missing an essential element. This is sound money, the lack of which is emerging as a central cause of America’s current travail. The failure of the GOP jobs bill to address this point is all the more troubling, because leaders like Messr. DeMint and Dr. Paul understand so clearly the monetary issue, as they made clear when, earlier this year, they introduced a bill known as the Sound Money Promotion Act, which this newspaper was the first to endorse.

The new GOP jobs bill gives excellent legislative shape to the fiscal facet of job creation. It abjures the Keynesian approach of borrowing and spending our way to prosperity. If such a strategy ever made any sense (we don’t see it, but some do), it certainly doesn’t make sense in an economy with near zero interest rates, a collapsing dollar, and budget deficits and government debt already at astounding levels. Instead, the new bill offers restraint on spending, reduction of tax rates, an end to prohibitions on drilling for oil, the promotion of free trade, the repeal of growth-inhibiting regulations, and liberation from Obamacare.

Absent a simultaneous demarche in respect of the dollar, however, the fiscal approach just offered can be defeated by a Federal Reserve that appears happy to facilitate congressional spending by purchasing government debt until the cows come home, even if milk goes to $100 a gallon.* There is a growing recognition of this problem among the Republican leadership, which was made clear during the debate on the economy Tuesday at New Hampshire. Speaker Gingrich in the most recent debate called for “hard money,” which surely is an allusion to the gold standard as well. It was a good moment for the speaker.

Herman Cain, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas, has spoken well of the gold standard and made commitments to keep the dollar stable and, at New Hampshire, spoke critically of the current leadership of the Federal Reserve. Congressman Ron Paul gave a classic performance on this question at New Hampshire, cementing his role within the candidates in contention as being best able to articulate the monetary issue. Our own view of Dr. Paul is that his failure to gain traction in the polls is due to other planks of his platform than the monetary one.

In any event, there is no time to lose for the Republican leaders working on growth and jobs. Our own recommendation would be for Messrs. DeMint, Paul, Portman, Jordan, and McCain to summon for a private meeting Lewis Lehrman, who has been advancing a practical, step-by-step plan for returning America to a true gold standard of the kind that would ignite a new generation of growth and thus jobs. Mr. Lehrman has a new book out and gave earlier this month at Washington an important speech laying out the case that a return to sound money is eminently do-able. It has, after all, been done before in our history. Bringing the fiscal and regulatory planks of a growth plan together with a monetary plank will be essential for the best platform for the coming election.

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* For the record, between January and the end of August, milk prices rose in dollars to $3.70 a gallon from $3.30 a gallon but fell in value to a 491^th of an ounce of gold from a 428^th of an ounce of gold.