LA Times is reporting that Democrats in the Congress are working on a multibillion dollar JOBS bill. The House is expecting to pass it in December and the Senate after the health care reform bill is passed in the Senate.
http://www.latimes.com/...
A few weeks ago there were reports in the WSJ that the White House was cool to a Jobs bill that the Congress was working on. Looks like that has changed and the White House is on board with a Jobs bill. Obama even mentioned this in his Thanksgiving message Wednesday.
Obama's Thanksgiving message this week:
Next week, I’ll be meeting with owners of large and small businesses, labor leaders, and non-for-profits from across the country, to talk about the additional steps we can take to help spur job creation. I will work with the Congress to enact them quickly. And it is my fervent hope – and my heartfelt expectation – that next Thanksgiving we will be able to celebrate the fact that many of those who have lost their jobs are back at work, and that as a nation we will have come through these difficult storms stronger and wiser and grateful to have reached a brighter day.
The goal is to get a Jobs bill on the President's desk in January. The House wants to pass a bill in December with the Senate to follow in January after they pass their version of the health care reform bill.
Troubled by the rising jobless rate, President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress are assembling a new jobs package that would devote billions of dollars to projects meant to put people back on payrolls in 2010 and keep them working.
Discussions over the scale of the bill are fluid, but lawmakers said the intent was to move swiftly and get a bill to Obama's desk as early as January.
LA Times reports on some of the plans for the Jobs bills.
Lawmakers are considering myriad ways to accelerate job growth. In interviews, they mentioned road projects that can be counted on to employ people right away, loans to small businesses, incentives for companies that agree to manufacture products in the U.S., and special partnerships in which government tries to avert private sector layoffs by picking up a share of employee wages.
House members are also considering a plan to funnel aid to state and local governments with the assurance the money would be used to preserve jobs. Senate aides said the jobs plan would give priority to labor-intensive "brick-and-mortar" projects.
Besides what will be in the jobs package, the discussion is happening on how to pay for it.
Faced with so much red ink, lawmakers are exploring various payment mechanisms. Congressional aides said they might tap money left over from the fund used to bail out financial institutions. Other approaches include a 25-cent tax on each stock transaction, though Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has expressed reservations about that idea.
Even if the plan inflates the deficit in the near term, the White House appears willing to accept that if the payoff is more jobs.
Asked if the deficit constrains the administration's options, one White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "No question that it's a delicate balance, but there's also no question that we've got to do more to address the jobs situation and to boost opportunities for middle-class families."
Now that the White House appears to be on board the one thing that the White House wants is that the package is NOT filled with pork projects.
Administration aides are talking to lawmakers about the bill and cooperating with the project. One imperative from the White House is that the bill be purged of wasteful pork projects.
"Folks who have their jobs face a level of insecurity that is unacceptably high from the administration's perspective," said the White House official. "So the president has tasked us to generate ideas and work with Congress on future job-growth measures."
As we all know the focus on jobs starts on December 3rd with the White House's Jobs Summit then Obama will start going on "listening" tours in various states on jobs while Congress is working on actual bills.
Having been preoccupied with passing a healthcare bill, the White House is eager to demonstrate it is sensitive to the economic hardship Americans face. To that end, the White House will host a jobs summit Thursday. And the next day, Obama will travel to Allentown, Pa. -- the first stop in a kind of economic "listening tour."
We all know that the GOP are going to bitch and moan about how there is too much deficit spending and how the recovery package didn't work but who cares what they have to say. Democrats are in charge and they must do what they have to do to get Americans back to work.