{"id":308642,"date":"2010-02-11T12:59:05","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T17:59:05","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.35780"},"modified":"2010-02-11T12:59:33","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T17:59:33","slug":"white-house-dont-count-on-job-growth-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/308642","title":{"rendered":"White House: Don’t Count on Job Growth This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

If President Obama wants a jobs bill with enough votes to pass Congress and enough firepower to create jobs, maybe his speechwriters should get started on a fall 2010 speech explaining why it’s not working to the public’s satisfaction. That’s the message from this<\/a> AP story:<\/p>\n

It’s a bipartisan jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a
\nbadly needed political victory and placate Republicans with tax cuts at
\nthe same time. But it has a problem: It won’t create many jobs…


\nAs for the bill’s effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said
\ncompanies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break.
\nBefore businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their
\nproducts, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those
\nworkers. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jonathan Chait’s take<\/a> makes sense: Passing the jobs bill will be a political victory today because it shows the Democrats doing something, anything. But it could turn into a political liability in the fall when it turns out that “something, anything” didn’t move the unemployment rate meaningfully.<\/p>\n

The Council of Economic Advisers report doesn’t do much to raise hopes of a jobful recovery. Last year, the White House embarrassingly<\/a>
\nprojected that a stimulus would keep unemployment under eight percent.
\nInstead it crossed ten percent. So you can understand why the CEA would
\nwant to be more circumspect about its projections this year. And
\ncircumspect, its projections are: 10 percent unemployment average for
\n2010; rising unemployment for the next few months as discouraged
\nworkers re-enter the workforce; and 9.2 percent U1 by the end of the
\nyear.<\/p>\n

The jobs picture is unsightly, unyielding, and most importantly,
\nunspinnable. But that doesn’t always stop the administration from
\nadding a twist. White House advisers frequently point to jobs that
\nhave been “created or saved,” but this coinage has become such a PR
\njoke that even President Obama poked fun at the term by claiming to
\nhave created or saved one turkey at the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning.
\nMy understanding was that the administration was going to drop the phrase entirely,<\/a> but here it is again in the CEA report:<\/p>\n

All told, the Recovery Act has saved or created some 1\u00bd to 2 million
\njobs so far, and is on track to have raised employment relative to what
\nit otherwise would have been by 3.5 million by the end of this year.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of the day, I suppose it doesn’t matter what your
\nterminology is. Voters don’t look at CEA economic models, they look at
\nthe unemployment rate. If Democrats want to create or save their own
\njobs, they need to move the latter.


\n

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If President Obama wants a jobs bill with enough votes to pass Congress and enough firepower to create jobs, maybe his speechwriters should get started on a fall 2010 speech explaining why it’s not working to the public’s satisfaction. That’s the message from this AP story: It’s a bipartisan jobs bill that would hand President […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}