The American Jobs Act

[classicman]

Originally Posted by BigV

An outline of the payment plan was described in the last bullet point up there.

President Barack Obama's promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.

It will only be paid for if a committee he can't control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future — the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals — don't roll it back.

Underscoring the gravity of the nation's high employment rate, Obama chose a joint session of Congress, normally reserved for a State of the Union speech, to lay out his proposals. But if the moment was extraordinary, the plan he presented was conventional Washington rhetoric in one respect: It employs sleight-of-hand accounting.

Link

We'll see, for sure we'll all see.

[Spexxvet]

I heard it said, recently "the only tax cut the republicans don't like, are the tax cuts that Obama does like"

I still think that it is incumbent on the private sector to reduce unemployment, not government.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

snip--
I still think that it is incumbent on the private sector to reduce unemployment, not government.

Incumbent in what way? The *duty of* the private sector? I don't agree with that, nor do I believe that it is the duty of the public sector to reduce unemployment (by direct hiring. making policies that are compatible with job growth, as DanaC says, that's a different thing and well within the purview of the government.). Incumbent is just not the right word, and I don't mean to be snippy.

I do believe that the private sector has vastly more potential to reduce unemployment by hiring more people than the government does. Yes, it's true that the single largest employer is government, but it is dwarfed by the aggregate private sector. That private sector though is made up of many many individual employers. Those individual employers don't have the same motivations to hire that the government does. A private employer hires someone new when the demand for work exceeds their ability to do that work with the staff on hand.

Let me repeat that. Employers hire new people when they can't deliver all the work they have with the staff they have. It is demand driven. I heard a small business owner say it this way this morning: "I hire someone when I'm working 90 hours a week. That's when it's time to hire someone new." That makes total sense to me. A tax credit/benefit/break/doodad that slightly reduces the cost of a new employee (which can be high, one of the MAIN REASONS that an owner will work 89 hours a week before deciding to actually hire a new worker) has an effect, but it is marginal at best. Sadly, that's how things work between government and business. Government (which does have an explicit interest in reducing unemployment) wants more people working, but depends on business to hire those people can only use incentives and disincentives to guide, to urge, to encourage such behavior. But look back a couple sentences...a business hires primarily based on demand, not on minor reductions of the expense of hiring. The government's ability to effect and affect such actions is indirect at best. But they sure get all the heat for the lack of success of such actions.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by BigV

Incumbent in what way?

Maybe "incumbent" wasn't the best choice of words. Reducing unemployment is something that must be accomplished, and the private sector is the only "entity" that can get it done.

In terms of business being a totally self-serving, greedy, short-term-bottom-line-driven institution, they should do it for themselves because they need consumers to buy their goods and services. Henry Ford paid his workers at a level that enabled them to afford one of the cars they they, themselves, had built. I grant you that, in the short term, high unemployment benefits the private sector (I'll bet you, UT, Wolf, and Classic would accept a job for considerably lower wages just to be employed, saving companies significant dollars) but looking at the big picture, there are fewer "things" being consumed when there is high unemployment.

Recently, "big business" has morphed into some kind of mutant social entity. It can donate to political candidates, and it advertises that it supports worthy causes. If business wants to show that it is a good citizen, it will put what's good for the nation ahead of what's good for itself, as the nation did for it with the stimulus packages and bail outs. At least for a little while.

Do I think this will happen? Probably not. Will our economic environment improve without this happening? Probably not.