Jobs speech

Not a bad speech, but there were some things I would have done differently and certainly a few things that he shouldn’t be proposing.

A payroll tax cut sounds nice but it means cutting funding for Social Security. That is a bad thing.

Saying we have to reform Medicare to strengthen it is usually the phrase used by people who want to cut benefits and raise the enrollment age – which means hurt and weaken Medicare. You may want to call it strengthening but if you cut the system back it is weakening it.

The Georgia Works program doesn’t work very well if at all, so proposing going national with that is a bad idea.

Putting people to work is a great idea, and the areas mentioned are important, but I don’t think it goes far enough. There needs to be more direct action to put people back to work, which means spending to actually create jobs. It worked before, it can work again.

Most of this is tax cuts and not enough actual jobs. I’ll wait till the real numbers come out, but I am not optimistic. I think that it was very telling that the Republicans in the chamber would not respond to even statements that should be uncontroversial, politically speaking. There were only 2 or 3 times when they applauded – with the exception of one guy on the end who I couldn’t get a good look at. You can’t prove anything either way from this about the Democrats, but it does show that there is no desire for bipartisanship from the Republicans.

I won’t hold my breath on the whole getting the rich and corporations to pay a fair share of taxes. And denigrating regulation doesn’t help either. The speech didn’t propose anything really strong, and it does threaten to make things worse. Paying for this by cutting the budget by another $500 billion? That isn’t exactly a novel position to take, and where do the cuts come from. There’s just too much politics here and not enough statesmanship. I also think the best it can do is break even on the budget.

As a campaign strategy I think it was very good, but it remains to be seen if this will get any jobs created. Like he said, we can’t wait 14 months to get something done. We need action now. We need jobs now. I wasn’t expecting any more than this. To be honest I expected a less forceful speech. Still, as much as this may help in some way, I don’t think it goes far enough. There won’t be enough jobs.

Screw the deficit, raise taxes on the rich and put people back to work now. Fix the roads, fix the bridges, fix the railroads, fix the electric grid, invest in alternative energy and repair all the damage done by the earthquakes and storms. That will create jobs and in turn help the economy.

That’s my initial reaction in a disorganized way.