Problems with the new Jobs Bill... already

Yes, I know, it hasn't even been officially unveiled yet. But I watched the speech Thursday night, and a lot of problems are self-evident to me.

• Repairing Infrastructure
  
  2 or 3 years ago, I would have been jumping for joy at this. It would quite probably (IMO anyway) have pulled us out of the recession early and helped us as a nation to improve the safety of the public. However, this is not 2 or 3 years ago. Those years have seen the highest deficits in the history of the United States, and today there is simply no more money left. It is not unlike a family seeing their roof is leaking, going out and maxing out all their credit cards, buying new sports cars, putting a new plasma HDTV in every room, then suddenly deciding they need more money to fix the roof.
  
  It's too late. We spent the money. On the wrong thing.
  
  
• The price tag
  
  

  
  The White House sees Obama's jobs plan -- a mix of payroll tax cuts and spending to upgrade roads, bridges and schools -- as the best hope for reducing the unemployment rate that poses the biggest threat to his re-election hopes.
  
  Early estimates suggested it could lift U.S. growth by 1 to 3 percentage points in 2012, lower the unemployment rate by at least half a percentage point and add well over 1 million jobs. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said it could create 1.9 million jobs.

  Source: news.yahoo.com...
  
  The latest estimates are that this plan will cost $447 billion to produce 1 to 1.9 million jobs. Now, I cannot determine whether that $447 billion is a one-time cost or is spread out over several years, but it still comes out to $447,000 per job if Obama's estimate is used and $235,263 per job if Zandi's estimate above (the most generous estimate I have seen) is used. Considering that the economic downturn will likely last less than 10 years before recovering on its own (assuming the government doesn't worsen it during that time), that is still between $23,000 and $48,000 per year.
  
  Assuming a ten-year term, $447 billion could supply 1.9 million people with an income of $11.31 an hour for a regular 40-hour workweek. Using Obama's figure of 1 million jobs, that equates to ten years salary at $21.49 a hour. So far so good, right?
  
  Wrong. Those figures do not represent the fact that the bulk of that $447 billion is not used right away and therefore would be assumed using any economic model to be interest-bearing, offsetting the cost. It does not take into account any support jobs created in response to the directly-created new jobs, something I am sure Obama would be loath to leave out of his projections. It assumes a full ten years of employment full time.
  
  In short, that's a lot more money than would be actually required.
  
  
• Teacher's jobs
  
  Here things get confusing. It's one thing to create jobs directly by repairing infrastructure, but it is quite another to assume that better infrastructure will on its own lead to new jobs based on that new infrastructure. I speak of the idea pushed forward of new teaching jobs based on repairing schools.
  
  Don't get me wrong; we need schools repaired desperately. However, from what I have seen, the problem with hiring more teaching staff is not directly related only to condition of the facilities. We also need money directly for those teachers salaries, as well as sufficient numbers of students to be educated. In order to get enough students willing to be educated, those students must be able to afford the education. There have been great leaps made in that area during my lifetime, but it still is not enough to give every student who wants a post-secondary education access. At the college I presently attend, the real problem facing most students is time. Pell Grants are extremely helpful, but not always enough to support the students (and their families) while they complete a degree. So they also have to find jobs... part-time jobs that allow them to schedule around school and still pay enough to eat, Those are even rarer than manufacturing jobs.
  
  In addition to this, school budgets are being cut. My college desperately needs several IT technicians; one instructor is handling the work of several himself, which is actually affecting his ability to teach. I approached him about a part-time job helping out and was told he would love to hire me but there was no money for him to hire anyone. And to make matters worse, they are expecting serious budget cuts next year.
  
  That means they could get 1000 new buildings, but still couldn't hire anyone.
  
  Another serious problem is of tenure. While I understand the purpose of tenure, it has become a way to force schools to often retain teachers who are actually detrimental to the education process.
  
  
• Tax credits to small businesses
  
  I guess even stopped clocks can be right twice a day. Obama's proposal to provide tax credits to businesses who hire American citizens, and especially American workers who have been unemployed for over 6 months, is a great idea... but one that shouldn't be needed.
  
  America has jobs. Mexicans are not wading across the Rio Grande for nothing; they have jobs ready and available for them. The reason they have jobs available is that, quite simply, the jobs pay so little that the jobs themselves are illegal. Minimum wage applies to all legal jobs in this country. To hire an American, a company must pay minimum wage, provide health insurance (at least will soon be required to do so; will be hard-pressed to find good workers now without doing so), provide unemployment insurance, provide workers compensation insurance, etc., etc., etc. An illegal Mexican worker does not require these things, because legally, he/she does not exist. They can be hired for $2 an hour, without any benefits, and worked as many hours a week as their employer wants, without overtime pay.
  
  I do not propose these programs such as workers compensation or unemployment be denied Americans; I suggest that the ease of hiring illegal immigrants to get around these regulations be reduced by enforcing the borders.
  
  
• Paid for
  
  I am having a hard time swallowing this, especially when we just a month or two back had a huge debacle in DC over passing a few cuts in spending. Now we are supposedly going to pass $447 billion in cuts? What changed?
  
  I file this under "I'll believe it when I see it".
  
  
• The ends justify the means
  
  Perhaps the most telling statement of the night came close to the end of the speech:

  
  Ask yourselves - where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways and our bridges; our dams and our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the GI Bill. Where would we be if they hadn't had that chance?
  
  How many jobs would it have cost us if past Congresses decided not to support the basic research that led to the Internet and the computer chip? What kind of country would this be if this Chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do? How many Americans would have suffered as a result?

  Source: www.wwl.com...
  
  We have the Constitution for a reason: to protect the people, you and me, from uncontrolled government. The restrictios are there for a reason. Over and over throughout history, governments have turned into malicious monstrosities which enforce unjust laws onto their citizenry, with deadly force and no recourse, bases simply on the fact that they can. Never once in history has the opposite happened.
  
  So whenever someone states that sometimes government must violate its own restrictions, I get worried. I for one like the fact that I may state my opinion of governmental actions without fear of being imprisoned or killed for my opinions. I for one like to be able to speak with others and to decide who I wish to associate with. I for one am proud that everyone in this country is free to practice their religious views without government forcing them to change those views. I for one am enthralled by the fact that I choose where I work, how I live, the car I drive, and so on.
  
  NO! The ends do not justify the means. America is still the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are still the land of opportunity, as long as government allows it. I do not believe allowing the government carte blanche authority to further erode or deny the ability to suceed is the answer; it is an escalation of the problem.
  
  And anyone in government who promotes such is, IMHO, a traitor to the office they occupy.

TheRedneck

Very well stated. IMO B.O. should have made this his first initiative in 2009. I acknowledge that healthcare in this country is flawed and needed some sort of reform. However, the forced issue of healthcare after he took office not only established his weakness in the face of political opposition, but it is also at least part of the reason for lack of jobs. Most small business owners live in fear of 2014, when "Obamacare" actually kicks in. And the first stimulus was a joke.
This president has become the enemy of growth and progress. He has embraced the worst policies of his predecessor and then advanced his own policies that, incomprehensibly it would've seemed, are far worse than Bush's.
I don't think much will change when a Republican wins in 2012 (Which is increasingly a certainty), but this guy is bad news.

Also, love that you use WWL as a source. That's my home station.

Peace

This almost sounds like the last jobs bill and I bet it will produce the same results.

reply to post by TheRedneck


I think you're dead on with your analysis. There's another thread where somebody is saying that this bill will work because 'it will get money circulating.' I think there's a whole lot more to this 'bill' than what is seen at first glance and, just as you've pointed out, the numbers simply don't add up. Also not clear is why, if this is truly such a 'simple' solution, this wasn't done years ago. Either the people in Washington writing policy operate on an intellectual level similar to that of a house fly, or this is another veiled corporate giveaway sold to the masses as the salvation of the country. There are a lot of really smart (albeit really, really corrupt) people on the Hill, so that leaves us with the latter.

Secondly, and I think this is the most troubling of all, is infrastructure spending isn't going to work like it did during FDR. That time, they knew we'd crawl out, even if it meant jump starting the economy by deliberately getting into WWII. Global markets didn't really exist like they do now, and we had an undereducated, poor but resilient and determined labor force screaming to be used. Now, whatever manufacturing jobs are created are going to be offshore because it's cheaper. Similarly, the labor force is simply not what it was post 1930's, either. The expectation for quality of life and material good attainment is dramatically different than it was pre-WWII.

We might be able to put a few people to work for 10 years building roads, but what happens after that? The manufacturing base is still gone. The 'main street' American small business is still pretty much gone, replaced by Wal-Marts and Safeways that suck capital out of the local markets.

The ONLY way this gets better is a complete shift in the so-called 'American Dream' as we know it, and a simultaneous adoption of strict economic isolationism. That happens, and American society might not survive it anyways. In short, we're screwed. This is what the end of an empire looks like, and even though we might prolong it 10, 20, or 50 years, it's coming, and it'll hit hard and fast when it does.

reply to post by radosta

Had Obama focused on correcting the problems with the economy when he was elected, I would today be praising him. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and am ashamed today to say I actually cast my vote for him; I am an American. But instead, he insisted on continuing (even escalating) the bailouts, and pushing through pet projects like increasing the tobacco tax a few thousand percent and instituting Obamacare instead.

I realize that this problem is not going to get fixed overnight; it was a long time coming and Obama did not create the problem; he simply made it worse IMO. The first stimulus did work, but it was far too little to be of any real help.

As I type this, reports are that the unemployment rate is 9.1%. That means at least 10-12 million Americans are out of a job, and that figure does not include those who have been out of work so long that their unemployment has stopped, nor does it include the millions (like me) who are under-employed. A million jobs, even 1.9 million jobs, would make a difference, especially to the holders of those new jobs, but would make precious little difference to the economy at large.

The problems we face, in order of intensity as I see them, are:

• Over-regulation, including Obamacare
  
• Immigration failures
  
• Lack of import restrictions to make American companies competitive
  
• Blanket government encouragement to move factories out of the US
  
• A too-high corporate tax rate.

So far, Obama has managed to exacerbate the regulation problem, failed to address immigration (even suing states who do try to address the issue), hailed NAFTA and CAFTA instead of acknowledging their role in making American companies uncompetitive globally, done nothing to stop the outward flow of American manufacturing jobs, and threatened to increase the corporate tax rate. All bad moves for anyone trying to improve the economy.

We need someone who understands where the jobs come from: business, not government. Government makes no product and seeks no profit, a fine thing in certain circles like advanced research or military deployment. But business does make things, business does provide services, and business does seek profit, and those attributes, while disparaged by some, cause business to be much more capable of creating jobs and opportunities for the public than government could ever dream of. Every investment in an employee means that a product will be manufactured or a service will be rendered for those who want or need it, and instead of increasing the monetary burden on the rest of us, that job will pay for itself by its very existence.

And I will agree that the present crop of Republican candidates is not promising either. Romney is the actual instigator of Obamacare, as Obama admitted to using his statewide Massachusetts healthcare-insurance plan as a model. Perry does not impress me as anything more than a modern version of George W. Bush, unconcerned about the people, the Constitution, or the nation, but immensely concerned with how he can benefit personally.

Perhaps if we could get Paul, Gingrich, or even Cain or Palin on the ticket, I could have greater hope... but they are all lagging far in the back.

TheRedneck

Originally posted by Vikus
This almost sounds like the last jobs bill and I bet it will produce the same results.

With history as a witness, two things are readily apparent: it's a given not a damn thing that guy said was 100% true.. and we already know it will produce nothing but an ominous sucking noise of failure.. with a few slurps... as der fuhrers 1930 German zombies shower him with love and praise... all hail der fath, er..homeland!! as history repeats..

"Hitler oversaw one of the largest infrastructure-improvement campaigns in German history, leading to the construction of dams, autobahns, railroads, and other civil works. However, these programmes lowered the overall standard of living of workers who earlier had been unaffected by the chronic unemployment of the later Weimar Republic; wages were slightly reduced in pre–World War II years, while the cost of living was increased by 25%"

"Increased economic activities were enabled largely by debt flotation (refinancing long term debts into cheaper short term debts) and expansion of the military"

secure.wikimedia.org...

It's all political, the Obama admin believes they can create a false bump in the economy, and lower unemployment just enough for a chance at winning the election.

Long term they know what is coming, they can't fix it, they can barely slow it at this point, they want to use more federal dollars in a wasted effort to win reelection.

Government contracts are the only thing that is employing millions of Americans right now.

If you want another analogy... It's like having everyone living in your household (able to work but can't find a job) unemployed, and out of sheer desperation and stupidity you give them all jobs and pay them out of your personal savings so that they can in return help pay the household bills and expenses.



If you haven't noticed, in many states where billions are already being spent on road construction projects, they are simply digging up and resurfacing the same stretches of roads over and over again... But, these contractors are all doing quite well... Many of them are getting away with employing illegal immigrants.

Go Obama.

Without actual dollar bills in peoples bank accounts, this economy will get nowhere. If businesses get tax cuts they will not hire new people, they will pocket the unpaid taxes.

The only way the pres is going to fix the economy is if he gives all the american people 1 million dollars each to spend on things, and when you buy things people have jobs to make more things.

Then with everyone having a million dollars, inflation hits big and puts us into a deeper hole.

There is no win to this situation, there is only lose.

Only valid question is how long to we put off losing.

This administration has no business sense. They believe a bigger government should get bigger and bigger and take care of everyone. They don't talk about the fact that a bigger government requires more of our tax money just to operate. Government spending, regulations, restrictions, and the size of government needs to reverse course in order for this country to start working better. Until voters make a statement supporting smaller governments and reduced spending, we'll be stuck with Obamacare, more taxes, more spending, more debt, and less jobs.

Well.......i hear everything you guys are saying (above me) , my question to you is a. How has Obama affected your day to day living ie. Life style since he took office? And b. You all have identified alot of issues with the state of our country. What would you do if you were the prez to fix these issues in a manner that would please congress, the government with in the government, the american people, and lastly the american people who will never be pleased?

i cant praise anyone who thinks government and spending will fix anything.

i also cant praise a dude who says hes his brothers keeper and then push classwarfare and someone else matters more than the rest of us.

there are a myriad of problems with the "new jobs" bill which was the same as the "old jobs" bill

tax the rich more and bail out the unions yet again and for a "broke " country which we all know we are

he sure has no problems spending money we dont have.

Originally posted by neo96
he sure has no problems spending money we dont have.

edit on 10-9-2011 by neo96 because: (no reason given)

We don't?
Where did it all go?

Originally posted by neo96
he sure has no problems spending money we dont have.

Didn't you get the memo?

Obama is the world's wealthiest Trillionaire... He has an unlimited line of credit, no risk, no interest or penalties, and can choose to not pay any of it back if he wishes.

Thousands of bankers and the Fed agree.. Obama can have whatever he wants.

reply to post by TheRedneck


Only $240 billion would actually go to roads, the rest is a tax cut for the poor (because getting more back than what they pay in wasn't enough) .. $240 billion on roads and schools would create maybe ... maybe.. 200,000 jobs that would last maybe a year or more.

Road work is already happening all over the country, most likely road construction teams will set aside the projects meaning they won't hire anyone, just move from one project to the next.

School construction can't happen until next spring .. can't tear a school down in the middle of the school year? Those types of construction (firm deadlines) create a lot of jobs very fast then disappear very fast.

The last "Stimulus" created no jobs, it "saved" jobs (cough cough bs) and the CBO's own estimates that it took almost $800k per job. The stimulus before that was almost $1m per job. But corporations made massive profits, as did executives of construction companies and machine producers.

($240 billion is simply far to small a number to actually effect the economy.. and since the money has to come from a trimmed budget, how many will loose their job from cutting other agencies to give a slight construction boost??)

Originally posted by Rockpuck
But corporations made massive profits, as did executives of construction companies and machine producers.

Right, especially Caterpillar, which has since relocated a large portion of its manufacturing to China.

Somehow, for every Job this administration creates, thousands leave the country.

I suppose if jobs are outsourced they simply don't count in the "saved or created" stats, do they?

Caterpillar... didn't they get stimulus money as well, and benefiting from infrastructure projects??

From their CHINESE site:

china.cat.com...

CATERPILLAR IN CHINA
Caterpillar is committed to be the leader in providing the best value inmachines, engines and support services for customers dedicated to buildingthe world's infrastructure and developing and transporting its resources.

How many US jobs were lost here????

With our partners and customers, we are building our future in Greater China.

That is what they say, and them along with a growing number of other US manufacturers, corporations and businesses are all either overtly, or covertly saying and doing the same... They all know what a future in the USA means, the smart ones are apparently making appropriate moves NOW.

Let's take a page out of the history books shall we. en.wikipedia.org...

The economy of the [Roman] Empire was a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.

An economy based upon slave labor precluded a middle class with buying power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end, due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.

Sounds a lot like what is happening to the USA? yes!

Originally posted by Fractured.Facade
Caterpillar... didn't they get stimulus money as well, and benefiting from infrastructure projects??

Caterpillar... didn't they get their Bush tax cuts?

Originally posted by Aihttik

Originally posted by Fractured.Facade
Caterpillar... didn't they get stimulus money as well, and benefiting from infrastructure projects??

Caterpillar... didn't they get their Bush tax cuts?

Absolutely, and they got even more from the Obama admin, especially when times got tough... But it still wasn't enough... What does that tell you?

In Caterpillar's own words:

With our partners and customers, we are building our future in Greater China.

Nuff said?

reply to post by Aihttik


unions
union pensions
government jobs
government pensions
social weldare programs named social security medicaid and medicare.

thats where not all but a huge chunk thats where borrowing from china comes in to pay the government and when that doesnt cut it taxes