by Teh Nutroots | According to The New York Times, December's losses bring the total to 2.6 million. And if you believe the article, this is just the thin end of the wedge. Who will be next? You? Me?
Which is why our co--blogger Bill Kavanagh is so right to say "Don't Back Down on Jobs, President Obama" and why his plan for tax cuts isn't going down too well with Bill or with Obama's fellow Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee.
There's sturdy common sense in their objections that we can only pray Obama and the Republicans in Congress will take in:
Several Senate Democrats emerged from a closed-door meeting of the Senate Finance Committee saying they oppose central tax provisions of the proposal.
In particular, members said they did not think the idea of giving employers a $3,000 tax credit for each employee they hire would work.
“I’m not that excited about that,” Sen. John Kerry told CNN. “Having a tax credit for hiring is not going to change that dynamic — creating a direct job will. So I’d rather spend the money on the infrastructure, on direct investment, on energy conversion and other kinds of things, much more directly and much more rapidly and much more certainly create a real job.”
Sen. Kent Conrad agreed. “I think it’s unlikely to be effective,” the North Dakota senator told CNN. “If you think about it, business people are not going to hire people to produce products that are not selling. Who is going to hire in the auto industry if you give them a $3,000 credit to make cars that people are not buying?”
A second Obama tax proposal several Democrats said they were down on is payroll tax credits — amounting to about $20 per paycheck, and totaling $500 per person and $1,000 for couple earning less that $200,000 a year.
Sen. Ron Wyden said he doubted that proposal to would do much to stimulate the economy.
“We have an example from the first stimulus that indicates just giving people $500 to $600 – while certainly welcome when there’s this much economic hurt – may not be the best use of stimulus,” Wyden said.
Instead, Wyden said pumping more money into infrastructure spending would be more effective in creating jobs.
Obama's response to the various objections, as filtered through Axelrod (following a "spirited" meeting with Democratic senators)?
“Obviously, it’s a big answer to a big problem and there are a lot of component parts to it,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview after meeting with balky Senate Democrats. “These folks are not potted plants. They’re elected officials, and they’re doing their jobs.”
He added, “It’s a collective process, and we’re willing to listen to people’s ideas.”
Asked if they were willing to adopt people’s ideas, Mr. Axelrod said: “We’ll see. It depends on the idea.” (NYT)As for Nancy Pelosi, she doesn't want to wait for all those tax cuts for the very wealthy to expire in two years. (WaPo) She wants to end them now.
Pelosi said the income tax cuts to the highest earning Americans -- which were decreased from 39.6 to 35 percent as part of the 2001 Bush tax plan -- have been "the biggest contributor to the budget deficit," which now stands at $1.2 trillion for fiscal year 2009. That deficit figure does not include the impact of the pending stimulus measure, which will cost around $800 billion, nor does it include estimates for supplemental spending bills that will come later this year to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the campaign trail, Obama touted an immediate repeal of the Bush tax cuts for top wage earners, while promising tax relief for the bottom 95 percent of Americans. He said he planned to use increased revenues from the repeal of those tax cuts to finance some of his ambitious agenda items, including a near-universal health care plan.
As the economic situation has grown more dire, however, Obama's advisers have hinted in recent weeks that they may wait two years and allow the tax cuts for the wealthy to expire, fearful of the impact of raising taxes during a sharp recession. And in an interview with CNBC Wednesday night, Obama himself said he had not yet decided what he would do.
I'm not going to comment on this since I don't understand the economics---though I note that he told us just the other day that we'd be running "trillion dollar deficits for years to come."
Let us hope he knows what he's doing and that -- unlike Bush --- he will listen to other ideas. At least Paulson won't be running the economy anymore....
Meanwhile, "forecasters" say that Obama's big plan is unlikely to do more than slow down the rate of contraction during the first half of the year.
“Even with a stimulus package, the unemployment rate is going to keep rising and by December it is likely to be over 9 percent,” said David A. Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center. In a speech on the economy, Mr. Obama said Thursday that the unemployment rate “could reach double digits.”
[E]ven with an ambitious stimulus plan, the economy will continue to contract through the first half of the year, though at a slower pace — and even if a recovery does kick in by early summer, it won’t generate jobs for many months after.“I would suspect that starting this past October and lasting through April, we will have really big job losses,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm. (NYT)
As Roy Edroso remarks, it appears from the polls that most Americans and certainly most right wing bloggers believe that the media and liberals are making the recession worse by talking and writing about it. In other words:
Did that work? It didn't? Oh. .... So anyway, Edroso, an evil liberal, insists on pointing out:
If you don't want to read about it in the treasonous, liberal, economy-destroying Times, you may read about it at the patriotic Wall Street Journal, which adds that the 2.6 million jobs America lost in 2008 is "the most since World War II ended in 1945."
At No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve M. says:
At Think Progress, raynman remarks:
It’s all Obama’s fault….
The New Right Wing Mantra
And he ain't even president yet.
But the fact is, if his plan doesn't work, he'll have to answer for failing. So let's all hope that he knows what he is doing. Partisan politics may start to break down as more people lose their jobs, their homes, and their retirement savings.
More discussion at Memeorandum.
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