Job-Creation Advocates Say Obama Just Doesn't Get It

This morning in Washington, President Obama was in the Rose Garden trying to make the jobs bill he was signing sound like a big success, chief economic adviser Larry Summers was at the National Press Club trying to make the administration sound tough on financial regulatory reform -- and a critical bunch of economists, policymakers and policy wonks were gathering at the New America Foundation to bemoan the fundamental unseriousness of the administration's approach to economic recovery and job creation.

Including that so-called jobs bill.

Leo Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who the event's moderator (and HuffPost blogger) Steve Clemons identified as a "former hard-driving Republican CEO", mocked the bill's emphasis on tax breaks.

"I have never hired a man or a woman based on a tax credit," Hindery said.

Employers hire when they are certain they will have a growing market for their products -- and they don't have that certainty now, Hindery explained.

As for the bill's emphasis on incentivizing small and medium-sized businesses, Hindery said: "I can't fix Dayton, Ohio" that way. "We have to have a large-business orientation," he said. "You've got to go after this with big ideas and transformational ideas."

"We have to come up with a non-belligerent equivalent of the kind of economic shock produced by World War II," said Huff Post blogger Robert Kuttner, who is editor of the American Prospect and author of the upcoming book: "A Presidency in Peril: The Inside Story of Obama's Promise, Wall Street's Power, and the Struggle to Control our Economic Future".

"You either need much more presidential leadership than you're getting, or you need more pressure on the president, or you need Congress to lead, or you need all three things," Kuttner said. "Because, otherwise, Obama is going to be a failure."

Senator Byron Dorgan, the retiring North Dakota Democrat and HuffPost blogger with a track record of economic prescience, warned that real progress in job creation will only come if the administration addresses the toll of uncontrolled globalization.

Likening today's jobs bill to opening a (small) faucet, Dorgan noted: "Even as we do that, we've got a wide open drain."

But he said that the minute you start talking about protecting American jobs in this town, "you are called some sort of xenophobic isolationist stooge who just can't see over the horizon."

Rep. Bruce Braley, the Iowa Democrat and HuffPost blogger who last year revived the Populist Caucus, termed the jobs bill a step in the right direction. (He was, after all, headed off to the signing ceremony.) "But the reality of it," he continued, is that "we have much greater issues that are out there waiting to be addressed...

"My advice for the president is that he get away from the White House and all his Ivy-League advisers and start spending time with average Americans who've lost their jobs, lost their businesses, lost their health care," Braley said.

Braley noted that Obama has been holding more town halls lately -- but for some reason still isn't getting unfiltered feedback from citizens. "Unless you're out there listening to a broad spectrum of ideas, you are going to have a narrow focus to your approach to job creation," Braley said.

Kuttner put it this way: Obama "is essentially a captive of the Wall Street wing of the party, and until he breaks out of that, we're not going to get the recovery that we need because we're not going to get the policy that we need."

Panelists agreed that there are things the government can do to dramatically grow jobs in this country, such as creating a national infrastructure bank, funding youth jobs programs, establishing strong industrial and trade policies in general and recalibrating the relationship with China in particular. But those things are simply not on Obama's agenda.

Despite the few kind words for Obama's policies, everything is relative. "I'm critical of some of the things of this administration," Dorgan said, "but I'm pleased it's there as compared to the last administration."

Comments

[Winston120]

01:15 PM on 03/20/2010

Obama lives in this elitist, academic bubble, and that environment is not aligned with job creation.

His tax break crumbs to small biz are a joke. Small biz will only hire when there is DEMAND.
He is attacking this from the wrong end.

Obama is much more aligned with the blood sucking union thugs whi believe you just bleed a business dry and then take it over (e.g. GM).

[teletom]

01:52 PM on 03/19/2010

Well, he may not have hired purely from tax breaks, but how many times has he fired because of tax hikes? Why do you think Boeing is moving from Washington state to South Carolina? It's because it's a more business friendly environment. Places with lower taxes are growing. What's the growth rate of California and New York?

[teletom]

02:01 PM on 03/19/2010

"The new assembly line in Charleston will aid Boeing recover from the persistent delays that have set the Dreamliner back by at least two years. Boeing picked South Carolina because of its troubling union demands and failing to accomplish a non strike deal with its Seattle based workers. In the past 20 years, the union in Seattle has shut down Boeing offices four times including a prolonged two month strike in 2008."

[teletom]

02:07 PM on 03/19/2010

"South Carolina’s legislature agreed to an incentives wrap up yesterday that that would make available basic organization facilities, large machinery, training services and tax breaks"

[Smartgirl1000]

01:09 PM on 03/19/2010

Here's a link to a blog post I stumbled across that clearly shows where the problem is...US manufacturers who basically say "We can't do business here unless the US labor market is more like China's."

Which means, get paid nothing, have no environmental or safety oversight, no consumer protection, just put melamine in the milk, lead in the paint, pay 'em nothing, and let 'er rip.

http://www.plasticstoday.com/blogs/some-oems-decide-desert-manufacturing-usa

[gerald4]

06:40 PM on 03/24/2010

Dear Smartgirl1000

The good paying US Manufacturing Jobs for high school graduates are Gone from the USA forever! They will never come back.

Free World Trade of products and commodities means that every US business must compete internationally based mainly upon price of the product to the final customer (and/or by bribing various government officials).

Labor cost is normally the greatest cost component of most products and commodities. The country with the lowest labor cost normally gets the product sale and the manufacturing jobs, and the import of foreign exchange currency in exchange for these products.

Free Trade does benefit the US importers, US distributors and US retail sales outlets of foreign made products with jobs for distributing imported products and providing the US average citizen with less expensive foreign made products, but this is at the cost of losing jobs in the USA to make these products, and the increase in the Balance-of-Trade Deficit.

If the USA had innovative products that foreigners did not have, then the USA could get higher prices for those products, until the foreigners copy the US inventions. The US government has also destroyed the US Technical Science and Engineering database that was used to create those innovations, patents, and inventions that allowed the USA to win WWII and live a good life for a few decades after WWII.

It will take many generations to re-create that capability that the MBAs and the Wall Street Master Financial Genuises destroyed.

[jumperpin]

11:43 AM on 05/13/2010

Right. Learn to live with global wage slavery, trickle-down, etc; then blame it on the gov't.

Citing "jobs for distributing imported products" is a revealing low point in your cherished race-to-the-bottom.

[winstonian22]

01:04 PM on 03/19/2010

Oh man. Obama - what a dud he is.

[Sam1969]

01:11 PM on 03/19/2010

A First Class Dud, that is.

[haiku man]

10:09 AM on 03/20/2010

a dud of the highest order.

[sarabono]

11:23 AM on 03/19/2010

Folks, Now here is a real problem. Caterpillar says Health Bill in it's current form, will add $100 Million to costs in just the first year ! Folks, this is one of the finest Company's in the World! Obama even acknowledged as much during his Caterpillar plant visits.

http://www.chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/03/caterpillar-health-care-bill-would-cost-it-100m.html

Is this Administration trying to eliminate all good high paying manufacturing from the U.S.? Gosh, how could this happen? I thought one of the purposes of this Bill was to help manufacturing so that we could keep good, high skilled manufacturing jobs in our country?

[jinxed]

12:42 PM on 03/19/2010

Maybe Caterpillar should ask itself where it was when single payer was taken off the table. I didn't see them or any other industry step up and support single payer which would have removed health care from their bottom line. To start with this kind of talk now while being AWOL during this past year's "debate" is unconscionable on their part and gives them no right to bitch now.

[mpc]

03:18 PM on 03/19/2010

Jinxed:

You need to go back and check the facts....the House plan would have mandated employers with $250K+ per pay period to pay 72.5% of indivdual premiums and 65% of premiums for family coverage. The Senate version required employers with 25 or more employees to pay 60% of premiums.

[JohnSawyer]

06:24 PM on 03/21/2010

Right now, the US government is subsidizing part of the medicinal drugs cost of Caterpillar employees (as well as that of some other companies, I'd guess). The government wants to reduce that subsidy by $233 per yer per Caterpillar worker. The number of workers affected is around 40,000, according to the Wall Street Journal--not all Caterpillar workers are affected. That amounts to about $10M a year increased cost to Caterpillar--not a figure over which they'd cut wages and/or dismiss employees, or move jobs overseas, unless they did so anyway just to make some people think they "had" to. The $100M cited for 2010 is a one-year accounting thing encompassing increased expenses from this subsidy reduction for the next ten years, not an ongoing per-year cost. This $10M a year increased expense isn't a tax--it's returning Caterpillar's financial liability for medical coverage for many of its employees somewhat closer to where it was prior to the subsidy.

I've noticed that many of the people who are angry about this reduction in the government subsidy to Caterpillar, are often the same people who are angry about the elements of the health insurance reform bill that provide subsidies to low-income people to help pay for their health insurance. This seems pretty hypocritical to me.

[JohnSawyer]

06:31 PM on 03/21/2010

A Wall Street Journal article explains some of the actual details about the Caterpillar story:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100319-712530.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

Unfortunately, reading this article online now requires a subscription, though it was free a couple days ago, but I copied an excerpt from the article before this happened:

"Caterpillar said this provision, along with eliminating the tax exemption on drug subsidies, would raise its health care costs by at least 20%, or more than $100 million, in the first year after the health-care overhaul program."

"That big increase would largely be a noncash charge, stemming from adjustments to Caterpillar's tax liability. Accounting rules require that the long-term tax costs be included on the company's balance sheet at one time, even if the taxes paid annually on the subsidies are actually much less. Although the health-care legislation would be phased in over a number of years, the tax effects of the legislation would be felt in 2010 if the bill becomes law this year."

"From an accounting standpoint it hits right away," said Roland McDevitt, director of health care research for Towers Watson."

[JohnSawyer]

06:33 PM on 03/21/2010

The $100M is a one-time hit, which at worst would apply only to Caterpillar's 2010 expenses, not the amount that would apply to future years' expenses, due to an accounting thing which requires them to lump the increased costs for about the next ten years, into 2010's accounting year. $100M would be a big hit to take in just one year, but even this may not actually be taken out of Caterpillar's profits for 2010--see the Wall Street Journal article. Even if Caterpillar had to pay $100M in 2010, all subsequent years would cost $233 x 40,000 workers = $9,320,000 (figures from the WSJ article). Rounded up, it's about $10M per year. A far cry from saying "$100M the first year alone!", by which people shading the facts are hoping people misinterpret as "$100M the first year, and more each following year".

[Okieborn]

10:48 AM on 03/19/2010

This President was suppose to be about hope and change and I voted for that, but I have seen nothing but a watered down healthcare bill and the same with the jobs bill !!
I just keep hoping he will soon see his way to caring about the poor and what is left of the middle class but it is looking dimmer everyday !!

[Sam1969]

12:47 PM on 03/19/2010

Obama only cares about Obama, so turn on the light and forget that Joker!

[haiku man]

10:40 AM on 03/19/2010

Obama has nothing on the front burner. He has no sense of urgency about unemployment (14 months?) because the unemployed aren't filling his coffers like Wall Street is. Obama could never deliver change because he's a spineless doormat.

[Sam1969]

12:56 PM on 03/19/2010

Well he's never had a real job, so how would he know anything about jobs?

[OliverTwist]

08:02 AM on 03/19/2010

When the president and the pundits were talking about the small businesses leading the economic recovery with job hiring I looked up statistics on employment my large and small businesses.

Here's the data for 2002 from the US Gov:

50% of employees worked for companies employing 500 or more employees making on average $38,657.

38% of employees worked for companies employing 2,500 or more employees making on average $39,485.

27% of employees worked for companies employing 10,000 or more employees making on average $39,462.

Some caveats: The definition of "employee" was not researched. Average incomes are not what most people earn since the income distribution is ususally bimodal or multimodal.

In any case, it is clear that large businesses dominate employement in the US.

[mummblemouth]

06:58 PM on 03/19/2010

I don't have the data in front of me, but I believe you're misinterpreting the data. Your larger employer figures are subsets of those employing 500+. This means 50% of Americans work for companies of over 500 employees and 50% work for those with less than 500. It seems a pretty even split between large and small employers if you ask me. Furthermore, your data is from 2002 and thus reflects the conditions then while the current conditions are much, much different. So, until you can see who is doing the hiring at the moment, you can't really tell which half of the employment engine is turning out jobs in greater numbers.

[simplify]

06:42 AM on 03/19/2010

Leo Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who the event's moderator (and HuffPost blogger) Steve Clemons identified as a "former hard-driving Republican CEO", mocked the bill's emphasis on tax breaks.
Rethugs have another voice, the Washington Post to propagandize with.

[rougebaisers]

05:42 AM on 03/19/2010

HE IS A POLITICIAN, of course he does not get it. Ambitious, HUGE ego, he is simply another politician, and his lack of caring for the unemployed, I mean REALLY CARING is evident. His approval of a miserably flawed so called health care reform bill is more proof. I am still predicting he is indeed a one-term president. Anyone who can be out of touch so much to blow the gift he was handed cannot be otherwise.

[wdw505]

05:58 AM on 03/19/2010

he still has to stay in office 3 more years to make it to your prediction

[michellbrow]

12:57 PM on 03/19/2010

X2

[gtalkspolitics]

05:14 AM on 03/19/2010

aAcritical bunch of economists, policymakers and policy wonks Leo Hindery and Steve Clemons why don't you guys write a proposal and sent it to the President STOP sitting on the sideline complainting and Do SOMETHING or shut up and get out the way so that we can get something done>>>>>>>>>

[wdw505]

05:59 AM on 03/19/2010

the fact that you need people to shut up and get out of the way is telling

[haiku man]

10:40 AM on 03/19/2010

amen.

[themodernleader]

05:06 AM on 03/19/2010

Obama gets it. He doesn't like what he sees of his oppositions goals.
Obama is a free market zealot in the tradition of the Robber Barrons of the 19th Century. Let the markets police themselves. Let the best monopolies win. Let the strongest prevail.
In international affairs he believes the same fanatically held vision. He argues that free trade has been the mechanism for improving the lives of mankind. It should not be regulated. Instead it should be expanded. Granted, there are winners and losers.
His moral defect is his need to be shielded under the wings of ostentatious and outrageous wealth and power. His every decision---whether in personnel selection and anointment or policy--- of any consequence since becoming President has been to benefit capitalistic predation. The other powerless citizens are left as ingredients to be dealt with by the absolute laws of American Capitalism.
For students of leadership it is nonsense to argue that Obama has accomplished virtually nothing. The dismal fact is that he has accomplished much towards his aim of making the financial institution, Wall Street and international conglomerates the dominant authority in American governance. To understand this fact is to understand the mission statement of the Obama Administration.

[suzc]

12:49 PM on 03/19/2010

So he's just Bush Revisited

[michellbrow]

12:59 PM on 03/19/2010

He has accomplished virtually nothing he said that he would and now if Healthcare does pass it will not be from him reaching across the aisle, with transparency or on the level.

He has made himself out to be not trustworthy.

[1hotgolfer]

03:29 AM on 03/19/2010

The President of the US gets it...he's a really smart guy, he gets it very well. He also gets that he's president in a system that operates under the process where the majority DOES NOT rule! If it did, POTUS would have 52-55 good Democrats in the Senate and a majority in the House that would be presenting him with sweeping legislative reforms that he would gladly sign into law. If we're blaming him and a majority of the Senate Democrats (minus Joe Liebermann and the Blue Dogs) for what ails us...something we have been watching for over a year...then it is us who DOES NOT GET IT!!!

[imb4me]

08:58 AM on 03/19/2010

You definitely get 1hotgolfer... I think people forget how the sytem actually works!!!

[michellbrow]

01:02 PM on 03/19/2010

No he does not get it .
He is too busy trying to make history and be a GREAT, Historical President he is not actually being a good president in the present.

His jobs bill was passed last year, he called it a stimulus package, remember.
Just one more thing for gov't to spend money on and then tell us they need more.

[gmb007]

03:28 AM on 03/19/2010

YAY!!! We're coming up in the world!

That's right, the US has moved up 7 spots to #14 on the list of Top 50 list of best offshoring countries.

Not offshoring from...offshoring TO.

We beat Ghana(#15) and Sri Lanka(#16)!

We are proving we can be a serious player among the best third world countries! Go us! Desperate, unemployed Americans can compete with the best of them!

"The United States...rose to 14th in the rankings due to the financial benefits of a falling dollar. The country is THE LEADER IN THE PEOPLE SKILLS CATEGORY and the combination of rising unemployment and political pressure to create jobs is increasing interest in onshoring possibilities..."

Top 10: India, China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, Egypt, Philippines, Chile, Jordan, and Vietnam.

Just think - maybe next year we can break into the Top 10!

People, we have officially become part of the third world.

FULL TOP 50 LIST and article
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/13719842?f=related

[vernbvb]

03:22 AM on 03/19/2010

Everyone has a complaint about the attempt to fix the job problem, but what is needed is some serious research, analysis and proposals from groups with expertise in the area. Our legislators are not equipped to address these issues. They are part of the problem. Neither are friends of the Administration. The Obama Administration needs to look to the Eeconomists, Sociologists, Urban Planners and other reputable individuals to lead a real probe/study of the problem. Of course CEO's and other Employers in small and large businesses will be involved but they cannot under any circumstance lead this effort. Their responses need to be assigned a weight based on built in biases to begin with based on the fact that they are in position to gain from the outcome of any study. This is a serious problem and it will never be resolved as long as we depend on our legislators and corporate America or any government led analysis. We need valid data from unbiased research and analysis in order to begin to plan strategies for real job initiatives.

Now would be a good time for ongoing transparency and inclusiveness because we don't need games and misrepresentation of facts from any source as it relates to jobs and the economy. Make the populace a part of the process by disseminating facts directly to them in laymen's terminology without the varied analysis beforehand. Afterwards the pundits and others can have a free for all.