America's Christmas present: Jobs
source: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/11/17/americas-christmas-present-jobs/
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Now that the House has passed its version of the healthcare bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is shifting her focus to jobs. With unemployment in the double digits and not showing any signs of getting any better, Democrats want to show some sort of progress on getting Americans back into the workplace. The hope is to have either a big bill or a package of smaller bills passed in December. How will they create new jobs? Well the House is looking at getting a big highway construction bill moving - but no one seems to know how they would pay for it - which would mean adding to the deficit.
President Obama has called for a summit in December between lawmakers, administration officials, small businesses, chief executives and union representatives to talk about how to get a handle on unemployment. The AFL-CIO has already given a preview of its ideas it'll bring to the summit. For example: Using TARP money to give commercial loans to small businesses and providing healthcare and food assistance for the unemployed.
How successful has the government been at job creation thus far? Recovery .gov, the Administration's site to let citizens track the effects of the stimulus money, has a big number labeled "Jobs Created/Saved as Reported by Recipients": 640,329 (as of 10/30). That's great and all, but by the same home page of the same site about $215B have been spent so far out of the recovery money. Which comes out roughly to $335,000 per job. (That's just me and a calculator and a few rounded-off numbers - I'm sure better estimates exist out there.)
Another side of the math is that if we replicated those 640K jobs that were created over the course of this year there would still be about 10 million Americans unemployed.
Expensive and difficult!
All right, how do you think we could drive unemployment down? Give us your best ideas.
FROM THE BLOG: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/11/17/americas-christmas-present-jobs/
SOURCES: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/68045-pelosi-switches-to-jobs
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125803687743645333.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1651501820091117
http://recovery.gov
President Obama has called for a summit in December between lawmakers, administration officials, small businesses, chief executives and union representatives to talk about how to get a handle on unemployment. The AFL-CIO has already given a preview of its ideas it'll bring to the summit. For example: Using TARP money to give commercial loans to small businesses and providing healthcare and food assistance for the unemployed.
How successful has the government been at job creation thus far? Recovery .gov, the Administration's site to let citizens track the effects of the stimulus money, has a big number labeled "Jobs Created/Saved as Reported by Recipients": 640,329 (as of 10/30). That's great and all, but by the same home page of the same site about $215B have been spent so far out of the recovery money. Which comes out roughly to $335,000 per job. (That's just me and a calculator and a few rounded-off numbers - I'm sure better estimates exist out there.)
Another side of the math is that if we replicated those 640K jobs that were created over the course of this year there would still be about 10 million Americans unemployed.
Expensive and difficult!
All right, how do you think we could drive unemployment down? Give us your best ideas.
FROM THE BLOG: http://blogs.current.com/news/2009/11/17/americas-christmas-present-jobs/
SOURCES: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/68045-pelosi-switches-to-jobs
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125803687743645333.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1651501820091117
http://recovery.gov
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- Obama, Democrats, Republicans, Jobs, 11 more
