I'm glad that the president has decided to propose creating jobs with new ideas after the Labor Day holiday, but I still don't understand the strategy behind them including huge deficit spending cuts and tax breaks at the same time as high unemployment during a bad economy.
Seeking to jolt the economy, President Barack Obama will propose new ideas to create jobs and help the struggling poor and middle class in a major speech after Labor Day. And then he will try to seize political advantage by spending the fall pressuring Congress to act on his plan.
Obama’s plan is likely to contain a mix of tax cuts, jobs-boosting construction projects and steps to help the long-term unemployed, a senior administration official told The Associated Press. The official emphasized that Obama’s proposals would be fresh ones, not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks and still supports, like his idea of an “infrastructure bank” to finance construction jobs.
On a related front, Obama will also present a specific plan to cut the staggering national debt and to pay for the cost of his new short-term economic ideas. His version will challenge the new “supercommittee” of Congress to go beyond its goal of $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction.
Confirming the deficit-reduction part of his plan directly, Obama told a rural town hall crowd in Illinois on Wednesday: “I don’t think it’s good enough for us to just do it part way. If we’re going to do it, let’s go ahead and fix it.”
Obama’s major economic speech will come right after the Sept. 5 Labor Day holiday. Republicans were underwhelmed.
I hate the Super Committee and all that it stands for, but Obama is doubling down on it and hoping the Gang of Twelve will fix everything. Is it some kind of ploy? I doubt they'll get much consensus in the end since Republicans will not negotiate. They will need Democrats to pass the Super Congress recomendations and if their are benefit cuts to our social safety nets then what that probably means is a deal of complete capitulation, but that's just me.
President Obama can push for jobs and more jobs with whatever means he can. It appears that he's not going to listen to his milquetoast advisers that want him to placate Republicans with a small package and instead insert 'new ideas' into his speech. I guess we'll wait for the trial balloons to be leaked out since we don't know what they are at this point. Go for it. Fight for the working class. Use the bully pulpit for progressive beliefs for a change instead of austerity. It's been a major fail in Europe and it will fail here too.
The AP is reporting that we'll hear more than these same ideas from the president in September, with a White House official saying that "all of Obama’s proposals would be fresh ones, not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks and still supports, including his 'infrastructure bank' idea to finance construction jobs."
It's a better message than all austerity, all the time. There's the little problem of how you get any of the six Republicans on the committee to go along with anything that would actually help the country, but we are at least now seeing more of an effort on the part of Democrats to challenge them on that by putting jobs at the fore of their rhetoric. You start with the message, and hopefully that will translate into action.
And please stop talking about shoes and dresses.
