Obama’s jobs-creation proposal

What happened

President Obama unveiled a $300 billion package of tax cuts and federal spending this week that he said would spark job growth and pump life into a sagging economy. In a speech before a joint session of Congress, scheduled to take place after The Week went to press, Obama was expected to propose a one-year extension of the payroll tax cut, which lowers Social Security taxes for working Americans, and an extension of expiring unemployment benefits—two measures that together would total $170 billion. Obama’s plan, which requires congressional approval, also includes $30 billion in tax credits for businesses that hire the unemployed, and $50 billion to be spent repairing crumbling roads, bridges, and schools. “We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party,” Obama said.

The president’s proposal comes against the backdrop of an increasingly stagnant economy, persistent joblessness, and growing pessimism. For the first time in 11 months, the government’s August jobs report revealed last week, no new jobs were added, with small gains in private-sector hiring negated by public-sector layoffs. This grim economic news has not been lost on voters. Six out of 10 Americans now give Obama a negative rating on the economy, while 68 percent disapprove of congressional Republicans. Only 19 percent think the country is on the right track.

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What the editorials said

What the country needs is a “severe course correction,” not more of Obama’s spending, said The Detroit News. His first stimulus package failed to get the economy moving, so why will this one work? Jobs creators “are shouting almost in a single voice” that they’re being crushed under the weight of a flood of financial and environmental regulations, and the added health-care costs imposed by Obamacare. To turn the economy around, the government should lower corporate taxes, close the loopholes, and eliminate excessive regulation.

That all sounds pretty familiar, said The Philadelphia Inquirer. At the height of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover tried to stimulate the economy by getting government out of the way, and letting the “invisible hand of the market” work its magic. Well, “it didn’t work in 1929–32, and it won’t work today.” We do need more government stimulus, said The Baltimore Sun, but there’s no time to argue with the Republicans about it. If temporary tax cuts and incentives for companies to hire the unemployed are all Congress will accept, then Obama should take them. “We need every new job we can get.”

What the columnists said

Only one job concerns Obama, said Thomas M. DeFrank in the New York Daily News, and that’s his own. Tackling the jobs crisis represents the last chance the president has of reversing the “growing perception” among swing voters that he “just isn’t up to the task.” His latest proposals are all about 2012, said Alana Goodman in CommentaryMagazine.com. Obama is intentionally serving up reheated proposals from the 2009 stimulus in order to provoke a “serious, drawn-out brawl” with House Republicans. His goal is to convince swing voters that the GOP is the “sole obstacle to recovery.”

Of course this proposal is about politics, said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic. Republicans are also motivated by the hope of retaking the White House in 2012, and thus have “neither the political nor ideological incentive” to stimulate the economy. In the debate that will now follow, Republicans will insist that this plan is just new stimulus spending. Obama will try to frame it in terms of commonsense measures the public will support—temporary middle-class tax cuts and better roads and bridges.

If only Obama and Congress would forget politics, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. The country desperately needs leaders who will tell them “the cold, hard truth.” We got into this economic crisis through years of self-indulgence; to dig out, we’ll have to make lots of shared sacrifices, accept higher taxes and lower living standards, and buckle down to the hard work of re-creating our economy for a new century. The longer we postpone the difficult choices ahead of us, the longer “our slow national decline will remain on the table.”