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Obama to propose $300 billion jobs package
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks with workers at the Lordstown Complex General Motors Plant in Warren, Ohio.
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Kai Ryssdal: In a week heavy with news of jobs and the economy, this is, you could fairly say, the political day.
There's the president's speech tonight, of course. And the Fed chairman's speech this afternoon was about as pointed as you're ever going to hear a central banker get.
So as we continue with The Breakdown, our economy one step at a time, what political Washington has to say about a key economic problem.
This evening, the president's going to ask Congress to approve an emergency program of tax cuts and government spending aimed at creating jobs as fast as possible. Our Washington bureau chief John Dimsdale starts our coverage.
John Dimsdale: Obama's roughly $300 billion plan is his second try at stimulating the economy. Back in 2009, he spent nearly $800 billion. This time, the tax cuts and spending are more targeted. For example, extending benefits for the unemployed.
Princeton professor Betsey Stevenson says every dollar given to jobless workers generates $2 of economic activity.
Betsey Stevenson: You give someone who's unemployed a dollar, they go out and buy groceries with that dollar. The money paid to the grocer with that dollar then gets used to pay wages to their worker. That worker goes out and purchases perhaps gas. It's that on and on and on as that dollar moves through the economy that generates the $2 in economic activity.
Another significant part of the plan will extend a payroll tax cut for workers and give a new one to employers who hire.
But Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to Republican presidents, says those tax cuts are likely to be saved -- not spent.
Bruce Bartlett: The payroll tax cut goes only to people who have jobs, who by and large are doing pretty well as compared to the unemployed. So I think you're getting very little bang for the buck there.
The president will also propose funding more infrastructure projects that offer longer term financial benefits for transportation and education. And finally, there'll be significant aid to local governments to keep teachers and police on the payroll. Bartlett says they're being laid off by the hundreds of thousands.
Bartlett: The main impact there will not be so much to create new jobs as to prevent jobs from disappearing.
Will $300 billion in spending and tax breaks be enough? Betsey Stevenson would like to see more, but she figures that's all the president can get.
Stevenson: He's not somebody who's going to go up there and talk pie in the sky on something no Republican would ever agree to. I expect to see something that will be extraordinarily bipartisan. I don't think we can do more in the current climate.
In Washington, I'm John Dimsdale for Marketplace.
To Cut, or Not to Tax: that isn’t the Question:
To tax or not to tax is not the question. To spend or not to spend is not the question. The question is do we want to be a democracy or an oligarchy, where multination corporations slave with impunity without regard to race, creed, ethnicity, or country of natural origin? (Anybody ever read The Grapes of Wrath?) While the right and left fight over who gets what crumbs are left over according to employer vs. employee, taxpayer vs. entitlements, Americans vs. immigrants, and issues divided along the lines of race, gender, and social morality, financiers are laughing all the way to the bank and cashing in big-time. Let’s talk about class: I have no beef with my last employer, who laid me off because I was “too expensiveâ€; his lease was $6000 a month, and even after hiring someone in at a cheaper rate (by his own admission) he was out of business in a year. Between exorbitant real estate and health care costs, no one is making it, or can make it in the future. The right and left should concentrate on the enemy they have in common: high finance and an investor-led, global business model that is destroying people and businesses in their working lives everywhere. The false dichotomy of cutting spending vs. increasing taxes misses the point: Wall Street and its lackeys in Congress (largely Republican, but not to exclude Democrats) are running the show! And now, they want to trash government, all government programs and democracies the world over in order to avoid taking any losses on their speculative excesses, and/or out of commitment to their failed ideology. The only reason supply-side economic policies—which brought us laissez-faire capitalism-cum-casino capitalism—did not fail utterly (and receive the blame it justly deserved) is because it was not allowed to; because taxpayers bailed it out in ‘08. That was an abrogation of the very free market economic policies that created the problem in the first place, and now proponents want to return to those very same free market economic policies? By both law and the weight of right-winger’s own ideological extremism, our banks should have failed and gone into receivership in ’08, with the FDIC paying off depositors up to (then) $100k, and no more. That means two things 1) Our banks should be nationalized and out of private hands entirely, and 2) there is no longer a valid argument for free market economic policies and against government intervention via Keynesian economic policies.
What is the point of throwing more billions in stimulus packages? Obama keeps allowing Corporations to ship US jobs overseas, and allows millions of foreign workers (most of the time unqualified) to come to the US and take the jobs of US Citizens which only creates more unemployment. Foreign workers create jobs for their own race (ie: Indians), so that they can bring their families and friends, foreign workers do not create jobs for US Citizens.
Just go to the Silicon Valley and you'll see the unfair reality by yourself, most of the employees in all those companies are from India!!
Then when they get tired of the US they go back to India. Some of them end up working for other Indian companies and others create their own companies with the knowledge and experience acquired in the US!! Is that beneficial for the USA? NOO! the only country that is getting huge benefits from all this corruption and crisis is: India.
Excellent post about some of the reasons why the country is in this jobs crisis:
" How is College going to pay off if all foreign workers with their work visas are taking most if not all the jobs of US Citizens and legal residents!!! Do Universities care about this, NO!! will they ever care? probably not, otherwise Corporations and Colleges profits will decrease in the short term. All Universities care about is: enrolling as much students as they can to increase their profits, even if Colleges have to lie to students of the reality of what really happens after graduation, and the job market. It does not matter what gets in the way of these for profit educational Corps, ultimately they don't care if students find jobs or not!
Also most Universities and Colleges get $ full tuition paid from foreign workers/students = more $$. In other words is a cycle of corruption:
These paragraphs caught my attention as well:
Obama or whoever wants to be US President: their plans of creating new jobs must include to take back all the jobs which were replaced by foreign workers who are still unemployed. Many of them were asked to train their replacements before loosing jobs. They need to address the misuse and fraud of foreign work visas such as: H1b, H2b, L1 visa. Thanks to the US Govt, which created these work visas: these US Jobs are given to foreign workers (most times unqualified) allowing US companies to hire this group of people instead of qualified US legal residents and citizens causing our unemployment rate to continue to increase on a daily basis! For creating infrastructure we have best brains and best educational centers and must utilize our work source.
If people want the economy to get better, people should vote for those who are really working for the interest of the American people and not for the lobbyist and corporations who import workers to fill jobs and outsource jobs and technology for greed, increase their profits no matter what gets in their way, keep shareholders happy, and pay Top executives as much as possible.
Good examples of this sad and unfair reality are the movies: The Company Men (2010) and parts of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)
This is the current reality of the job market in the USA:
Top 100 H1B Visa Sponsors -2011 H1B Visa Report:
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/Top-Visa-Sponsor-2011.aspx
Rank H1B Visa Sponsor H1B Visa Petitions Average Salary
1 Microsoft 2,505 $96,497
2 IBM 1,263 $80,908
11 Intel 404 $95,714
14 Oracle 376 $104,080
16 Google 355 $103,129
17 Hewlett Packard 340 $99,344
21 Yahoo 308 $105,112
26 Amazon com 255 $99,459
27 Motorola 249 $95,861
45 Apple 175 $110,987
47 Cisco Systems 169 $117,662
84 SAP America 102 $105,498
91 PayPal 98 $105,008
185 AT&T 91 Sign In
3 Facebook 86 Sign In
These companies don't give a s* if mergers cause mass layoffs, higher prices for consumers, or if thousands of US legal families are having a hard time (thanks to their "hiring practices"), America's Unemployment Rate, new graduates unemployment rate etc..
*** Important *** Please see link below about an important Bill Congress is planning to pass. Your support on this is imperative for everyone who has been affected / displaced by people with foreign work visas, H1B visas, or the unemployed, or the ones who do not have a solid full-time employment history in their resume.
Please take action, vote and share your comments at: "
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h2501/comments
"every dollar given to jobless workers generates $2 of economic activity."
Then all we have to do is give every jobless worker $200,000 and that will turn into $400,000! then for the "low" cost of $2.8 trillion we can stimulate the economy by $5.6 trillion.
Seriously, giving a jobless person a dollar is not better than giving a jobless person a job. Mostly because people spend money no matter where it comes from, unemployment or employment.
These people would have us believe that the answer to all this is to pay people not to work.
