President Obama Makes the Long Awaited Rhetorical Pivot to Jobs
Posted by Michael A. Kamperman on January 23, 2010
Finally, in the wake of the Massachusetts political earthquake, President Obama went to Ohio and promised “so long as I have some breath in me, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I will not stop fighting for you,” Mr. Obama said. “I will take my lumps. But I won’t stop fighting to bring back jobs here.” Jobs have been the number one issue in the country all year. The President and his political advisers failure to see this cost them a key senate seat. So it is refreshing to see President Obama talking the talk. What remains to be seen is if he is willing to walk the walk. As Bob Herbert so distinctly pointed out in his NYT column “Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely….What we’ll get instead is rhetoric. It’s cheap, so we can expect a lot of it.” In Ohio the President failed to unveil an aggressive new jobs agenda. Hopefully he is saving it for his upcoming State of the Union address. What the President and his advisers need to understand is it wasn’t rhetorical failure that caused an electoral revolt, it was double digit unemployment rates where everyone knows someone out of work.
Bob Herbert has hit on half of the impediment to solving our economic crisis, the Washington mantra of deficit reduction. The other half is the Washington and Wall Street mantra of denial, as in we have avoided entering another Great Depression. Usually this is then followed by the laughable statements that the recession is already over and we are on the cusp of rapid economic recovery. We’re told we all just need to be patient. The weekly jobless claims are rising again. In fact, the economy averaged 1.2 million fewer jobs in the fourth quarter of this year than in the third quarter. Who in their right mind thinks an economy that lost 1.2 million jobs is growing? Certainly not the voters of Massachusetts. President Obama needs to quit defending his Administrations actions and speak honestly with the American people. He needs to say he inherited the worst downturn since the Great Depression, yet despite the efforts and measures taken so far by his Administration the unemployment rate keeps rising. Therefore, he needs to say he will do whatever it takes to put America back to work no matter the cost.
What President Obama and the rest of Washington seem to fail to understand is there are only two ways to significantly reduce the trillion dollar deficits we now have. The first way is to raise taxes, slash spending, and let the unemployment rate rise and rise and rise while unemployment benefits, cobra benefits, and assistance to the states are allowed to expire. That is a recipe for economic disaster. No big bank will be left standing and no big state will be left solvent. The second way to reduce the deficit is to fix the broken economy by fixing the broken credit markets. A true economic recovery would contain job gains, millions of them. The deficit will come down when the unemployed go back to work and go back to paying state and federal taxes. To fix the broken economy the federal government is going to have to spend money to make money. But the money must be spent wisely. For instance, small businesses don’t need a job creation tax credit, they need to be able to access credit to run their businesses and they need for their consuming customers to be able to access affordable credit to buy from their businesses. President Obama, if I hear you talk about bringing down the deficit and living within our means next week, then I’ll know your long awaited pivot to jobs is just rhetorical.
