The Jobs Act, presented by President Obama last night, calls for $447 billion in funding and urges Republicans to end the political circus. But journalist Charlie McGrath says this is all just a political stunt for the 2012 elections.
President Barack Obama’s long-awaited jobs plan will not bring the country’s unemployment under control, says Charlie McGrath, the founder of the Wide Awake News website. He believes that crisis is driving the country and that those in power have taken a reactive stance.
“Statistics show that 400,000+ people filed their first unemployment claims last week. This is the new normal. We live in an age of 400,000+ plus first unemployment claims, 9+ per cent unemployment and governing by crisis. Every event that comes down the pipe is a crisis in Washington DC,” McGrath told RT.
Obama said the new bill would focus on extending and introducing new tax breaks rather than injecting capital directly. But these were just “broad strokes”, offering no specific action, claims Charlie McGrath.
“It is more Washington DC cooking the books. The new bill is not funded,” he says. “It will go to the floor and we will have a TV drama debate, just like we did when he raised the debt ceiling.”
It is all nothing but political maneuvering in the run-up to the 2012 election, concludes McGrath.
Larry Birns, the director of the Council of Hemispheric Affairs, hopes the new jobs bill will make use of the money lying idle in bank accounts. But given the fact that in the last quarter no jobs were created, it is hard to expect any changes.
“The Republicans are certainly not going to encourage any help to the Democratic administration. They would like to see President Obama fall flat on his face, because this would lessen the likelihood that the president gets re-elected,” Birns told RT.
However saving America’s withering jobs market is possible with less spending, claims Robert Naim, policy director at the Just Foreign Policy think tank. Bringing US troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq would do much better in that respect than what President Obama has proposed, he argues.
“This wouldn’t cost the government a dime in additional revenue or deficit spending,” said Robert Naim. “It is a question of moving the money from the military budget to the domestic budget and every time, according to research of the University of Massachusetts, you move a billion dollars from the military budget to the domestic economy, you save 2000 jobs.”