Similar to Healthcare - We don't Have a Plan; But We'll Block Any Plan You Have For Jobs Mr. President
Bobblehead S. E. Cupp, on CNN's Crossfire this week, had Former Labor Secretary, (under President Clinton,) Robert Reich (who helped create a net 22 million job increase) and Governor Tim Pawlenty. and what she had was Republican talking points, typical of right-wing media and talking heads. She kept spewing prepared Republican/Teapublican talking points, not listening, or even hearing what her guests were saying. What is the Republican's plan for creating jobs? They don't know, but they know their willing to obstruct any ideas the President has, sound familiar? What's their plan for healthcare for 40 million Americans that didn't have it, and/or couldn't afford it? OH! That's right, they don't have one, but they spent taxpayer money to the tune of over $60M voting 48 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Here's just a snippet from the conversation on CNN's Crossfire where Governor Pawlenty says what he thinks business is saying, and what Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said to set him straight:
PAWLENTY: "Guess what? There's a consistent answer from those folks about what they want. And they basically say to government, do things to encourage me, not discourage me. Make the load lighter, not heavier. And that includes things like taxation, like energy policy, like health-care policy and more. But they're basically saying don't do things to make my life more difficult, more expensive, more bureaucratic, more inefficient."
CUTTER: "Well, Governor..."
REICH: "Actually, it's..."
CUTTER: "Go ahead."
REICH: "Stephanie, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I just want to say that -- that I'm very proud to be part of an administration that presided over the creation of 22 million net new jobs. That was the Clinton administration."
See the interview from CNN's Crossfire Here
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What Does Raising the Minimum Wage Do? Help or Hurt Job Creation?
Republicans and Tea Party members say that government wants to force employers to raise wages, raise taxes on "top job creators," (which we absolutely know has been proven not to be true that the "trickle down theory" by cutting taxes on the rich creates jobs,) and force employers to cut-off hiring at 50 employees to avoid the Affordable Care Act mandates, is not a recipe for creating jobs. Robert Reich speaking on raising the minimum wage says: "Raising the minimum wage, we've been raising
the minimum wage in this country since 1935. Raising the minimum wage
is good for the country. It puts more money in the pockets of people.
Sixty-five percent of Americans want to raise the minimum wage. Most
minimum- wage workers these days are not teenagers. They are
breadwinners. If you help them, you are helping the economy overall."
"And a lot of employers will benefit from a higher minimum wage. We
know empirical studies show that. This is not a matter of government
planning. This is a matter of doing what we have done in this country --
in fact, if we had a minimum wage today that was as high as it was in
1968, adjusted for inflation, it would be $10.40 an hour. And if you add
in productivity improvements, minimum wage actually would be $15 an
hour."A large swath of economists agree, raising the minimum wage is a good idea.
In a letter released Tuesday, January 14, 2014 through the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, 75 economists, including seven Nobel Laureates, argue that the government should hike the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour by 2016 and then peg future increases to inflation. A proposal from Senate Democrats, backed by President Obama, to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour is currently stalled in Congress. Read More from The Huffington Post. Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Larry Summers, argue that the "weight" of the evidence indicates past minimum wage hikes haven’t hurt the job market."Research suggests that a minimum-wage increase could have a small stimulative effect on the economy as low-wage workers spend their additional earnings, raising demand and job growth, and providing some help on the jobs front."
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Republicans Say President Holding Up "All There Jobs Bills"
The problem with that statement is that they don't have ANY jobs bills. So how do they get around that? Call every bill a "Jobs Bill." On Speaker John Boehner's Blog page he says that the White House is "pivoting" back to jobs and the House doesn't have to pivot because they have always been about jobs. He offers a list of "Jobs Bills," the problem? He lists numerous bills, but in the description of the bills offers misleading or straight out false information. He lists bills that favor the oil & gas industry by more deregulation (remember, after 300,000 people in West Virginia had their drinking water contaminated by a Koch Brothers affiliated chemical company he said "there are plenty of regulations in effect.") and bills that help the ultra-rich with more tax relief, etc., but none of the bills actually create a significant number of jobs. Check the Speaker's page and then check the actual bills at www.GovTrack.us.
But for Boehner, the best course of action is to cut off
those struggling most, while asking the Senate to pass the “jobs bills”
already approved by the House.
What “jobs bills”? As it turns out, Boehner has decided
that every time House Republicans pass a bill that advances House
Republican priorities, the party gets to label that a “jobs bill.” The
GOP approved more oil drilling? That’s a “jobs bill.” The GOP voted to
take away health care benefits from millions of Americans? That’s a
“jobs bill,” too. The GOP disapproves of clean-air regulations? “Jobs
bill.” The GOP wants more “transparency” in federal spending? “Jobs
bill.” Republicans cut food stamps? “Jobs bill.”
I’m not exaggerating in the slightest; this is all from the list of “jobs bills” the Speaker of the House has pulled together and presented to the public.
How many actual jobs would be created if these bills became law? No one
knows because Republicans never submitted them for independent economic
scrutiny, but GOP leaders are confident the answer is, at a minimum,
some.
What the Republicans "Say" and "Do" are Different, as Usual
Republicans came out this year saying they have a "Jobs Agenda," and it's not just the same old "cut taxes to the rich job creators" and "remove all those pesky regulations that tie the hands of industry."  |
| Photo by legalinsurrection.com |
Nationwide, many our lifeline systems are approaching a different kind of catastrophe. One trillion dollars is the price tag on the U.S. infrastructure deficit, an issue President Obama knows well.
“We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy,” Obama said.
Quietly and consistently, infrastructure is emerging as one of the three key elements of Obama’s clarion call to returning to the domestic agenda.
Second only to jobs—above even energy—infrastructure, that critical and unsexy topic has come to the fore of the president’s mind and message.
Back in June, 2011 The U.S. Conference of Mayors, put forward a resolution to Congress that the $126 billion dollars going annually to pay for America’s wars abroad be spent at home instead.
The mayors set an agenda that mirrored the presidents: jobs, sustainable energy, and rebuilding America—roads, dams, water and sewer systems, among others.
“That we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City, absolutely boggles the mind,” L.A.’s flamboyant and outspoken Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. Read More from The Daily Beast June 23, 2011 article.
Michael Tomasky in an article The GOP's "Jobs" Hypocrisy for The Daily Beast on January 3, 2014 writes about a piece by Michael R. Strain of National Affairs "A Jobs Agenda for the Right" whereas Michael makes some suggestions to the Republicans. It includes, ready? wait for it, INFRASTRUCTURE! Where did we hear that before? One particular part of Michael's work is this:
"This employment crisis is one of the most
important and immediate social and economic problems facing the country
today, and none of our elected leaders can afford to ignore it. Yet both
parties are more or less doing just that. The Democrats talk about jobs
policies, but their approach to the problem — with its emphasis on
massive short-term fiscal stimulus and inefficient public spending — has
proven neither popular nor (at least in the form attempted at the
beginning of the Obama years) up to the challenge. It consists of the
timeworn economic mantras of the left and is not equipped to address the
problems we now have.
Republicans are, if anything, worse off. They
often refuse to even acknowledge the problem, or to acknowledge the fact
that it requires ambitious policy solutions. They, too, mostly repeat
familiar formulas from their party's glory days which offer proposals
that do not seem well connected to today's economic realities. Some of
their ideas — fostering a more stable business climate and financing
lower tax rates by shrinking a few tax loopholes, for example — could
help, but they are not nearly adequate for the challenge America
confronts. To offer the public a plausible agenda for a true recovery of
the labor market, Republicans will have to dig deeper."
He continued "Anyone who has driven on a highway in Missouri
or has taken an escalator in a Washington, D.C., Metro station knows
that the United States could use some infrastructure investment. And
expanding public-transportation options from poor neighborhoods to
commercial centers could increase economic mobility and the incomes of
the poor — a goal conservatives should certainly support. Today's low
interest rates only increase the desirability of a multi-year program of
high-social-value infrastructure spending.
The 2009 stimulus bill failed to direct funds
effectively to such projects, but that does not mean that infrastructure
spending, if properly conceived and directed, cannot do a great deal of
good. And, of course, to ensure that federal debt is on a stable
trajectory, any large increase in spending should be coupled with
restraints on the future path of middle-class entitlement spending and a
reining in of tax expenditures.
Carefully targeted infrastructure spending
should also be coupled with a more pro-growth monetary policy. Monetary
policy surely offers the best way to boost aggregate demand in the short
term. By keeping the federal funds rate at zero and pursuing its
long-term asset purchase program (known as quantitative easing or QE),
the Federal Reserve has done much to support the economy during the
Great Recession. But growth is still slow and the labor market is still
very weak. Is there more the Fed could do?"
I think, of course, it’s the latter, and there’s further evidence for my guess in the way Strain talks about recent history. The 2009 stimulus was not a failure in infrastructure terms at all (has he read Michael Grunwald?). But even if you believe it was an infrastructure failure, or have to say so for political reasons, should you not acknowledge in fairness that it was Democrats and liberals who wanted it to have more infrastructure spending, and that nearly 40 percent of bill took the form of tax cuts because that’s what Republicans demanded (before they decided en masse to vote against it anyway)?"
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| Meme by waliberals.org |
President Obama's Proposed Jobs Bills
First there's The American Jobs Act which calls for:
1. TAX CUTS TO HELP AMERICA’S SMALL BUSINESSES HIRE AND GROW.
2. PUTTING WORKERS BACK ON THE JOB WHILE REBUILDING AND MODERNIZING
AMERICA.
3. PATHWAYS BACK TO WORK FOR AMERICANS LOOKING FOR JOBS.
4. TAX RELIEF FOR EVERY AMERICAN WORKER AND FAMILY.
5. FULLY PAID FOR AS PART OF THE PRESIDENT’S LONG-TERM DEFICIT REDUCTION
PLAN.
Learn more at www.WHITEHOUSE.gov
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| Photo by www.whitehouse.gov |
80% of our infrastructure is deemed "obsolete" or "in need of immediate
repair." Infrastructure bills in the past have gone through the House
and Senate with ease, but that's before the day after our current
President's first inauguration where Senator Mitch McConnell laid out the 1st
priority of the Republican Party, which was to "make the President a
one-term President." That was their first priority, not the wars,
not the great recession created by President George W. Bush, who came
into office with a $500M surplus and left with a $10B deficit, with two
unpaid wars going on, one of which President Bush out right lied about to
get us into. Or the unpaid "Prescription Drug Bill" that cost us over
$720B that they said would only cost us $320B and gave drug companies a windfall by not allowing Medicare and Medicaid to negoiate the prices of prescription drugs, not the 700,000 jobs per
month being lost when President Obama took office, no, first priority
was to make the President a one-term President. The Republican Party
then started to have other problems, the ultra-rich backed Tea Party
started to challenge Conservatives and blocked anything that didn't fit
into their absurd agenda. The Republican Party became broken and
produced the "Worse Productive Congress in the History of the United
States," the 113th Congress. Obstruction was to put it lightly. Closing
down the government to try to repeal The Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare,) after already spending $59M to have
47 votes to repeal the law may have been the beginning of the fall of
the Tea Party, but we'll just have to hope and see in the 2014
elections. House Speaker John Boehner finally stood up to some of the
"groups" like Freedom Works, The Club for Growth, and Heritage Action,
when the House passed the Ryan-Murray budget. But came right back and
said there was no way they were going to raise the minimum wage, extend
the Emergency Unemployment Compensation, and said, after Freedom
Industries, a chemical company affiliated with the Koch Brothers,
contaminated the drinking water for over 300,000 people in West
Virginia, that "there are plenty of regulations in place."
We need jobs, not deregulation, not blocking of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill, not Voter ID Laws, not blocking raising the Minimum Wage, not cutting Food Stamps by $40B, not easier permitting processes for drilling and Fracking, not a Keystone XL pipeline that will bring tar sands oil through our country only to go to a refinery in the Gulf owned by a Saudi Arabian oil company and Shell oil, to be exported to China and other nations, that will raise gas prices 25-40 a gallon here in the U.S., not stalling immigration legislation, not spending more than $70B of taxpayer money voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare,) not giving $154B in tax subsidies to corporations like we did last year, WE NEED JOBS!
