Don't Call President Obama's Economic Proposals a Jobs Agenda

[Better Believe It]

Don’t Call This a Jobs Agenda
By: Jon Walker
August 5, 2011

Now that the debt ceiling fight is over, President Obama has promised to pivot to jobs. The problem is that most of the elements of his so-called jobs initiatives are seriously weak. Calling these items “”jobs programs” might help temporarily prop up Obama’s poll numbers, but in the long run the administration is setting themselves up for big political blowback.

The components of the administration’s jobs agenda are either too weak, only tangentially related to jobs, or even possibly counterproductive. The patent reform working its way through Congress is unlikely to produce many jobs. Similarly, the free trade deals Obama is trying to sell as a way to boost manufacturing jobs could easily do more harm than good. Even if all of them passed, it would be insufficient to address the scale of the problem.

Obama would be better off politically if, in addition to the small stuff actually put forward, there was a big easy-to-understand jobs program like directly hiring 2 million Americans to replace every sewer line over 50 years old. It probably wouldn’t get through Congress, but if employment is still high in 2012 Obama could at least try to pull a Harry Truman, blaming the do-nothing Congress for not passing his big jobs plan.

That is not the best campaign message to run on in a bad economy, but it is better than trying to explain how Republicans are to blame for the failure of your jobs agenda, even though they passed it, because they made you preemptively ask for too little.

Read the full article at:

http://elections.firedoglake.com/2011/08/05/dont-call-this-a-jobs-agenda/

Or how about proposing a bold infrastructure jobs program .... the kind that the Obama administration rejected in 2009? BBI

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1672680