Obama's Choice: Jobs Now or Republicans in November
To: President Obama
From: The Looting of America
Re: Speech you should give to prevent a Republican sweep next fall.
"My fellow-Americans,
We face a true national emergency. More than 30 million Americans are without jobs or are working part-time because there are no full-time jobs to be found. The official 10.2 percent unemployment rate hides the true extent of the problem. The real jobless rate is at least 17.5 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. This is unacceptable. No nation and no President can allow this to continue.
After one year on the job, I had hoped my economic program would have put more people to work. Obviously, it hasn't done nearly enough. Yes, the stock market is up, GDP is growing and Wall Street is making record profits again. But the only true measure of economic health is employment. Our people are truly hurting.
Therefore, I am proposing the following emergency actions:
First, I am creating a National Teachers' Corps that will add one million new teachers by September 1. Each job will cost us about $50,000 so the total bill is $50 billion for this badly needed program. We will target these jobs for recent college graduates who are unemployed. I'm sure that our school districts will find room for them immediately.
Second, I call for a Charitable Non-Profit Jobs Creation Program to provide each non-profit organization in this country with a $100,000 grant if they hire two new employees within the next two months. We have approximately 500,000 charitable non-profits so this program would create 1 million jobs for $50 billion. Charitable non-profits will have no problem creating these badly needed positions.
Third, I will create an Energy Civilian Conservation Corps to weatherize every business and home in the country. Because these jobs would require additional supplies they are more costly: For 500,000 jobs it will cost $50 billion. However, this program is financially sensible in face of rising oil prices and the costs of ongoing global warming.
These three programs would put 2.5 million of our unemployed to work in a matter of months at a cost of $150 billion. And this doesn't include the multiplier effect that would follow and would lead to another million jobs as the newly employed earn and spend their incomes.
But how do we pay for it?
I know you are worried about debts and deficits. You don't want us to become even more indebted to foreign powers. Nor do you want us to pass on these debts to our children. And you do not want to see your taxes rise, either. Neither do I.
But some of us are much more able to afford to contribute. Those of us who have made hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, have more than enough to repay this great nation for all that it has provided. This is the time for those with phenomenal wealth to help put America back to work.
Therefore I propose:
- A 5 percent wealth tax on all those with more than500 million in assets. This is temporary surcharge that would be removed once the unemployment rate goes below 5 percent). This surcharge would generate about75 billion in one year on just the 400 richest Americans, who collectively have 1.5 trillion in assets. The surcharge on the next one thousand wealthiest Americans would provide an additional50 billion. Surely these successful entrepreneurs want to put their fellow Americans to work in our schools, in our charitable organizations and in our energy efficiency programs.
- Next I call for a 90 percent windfall profits tax on Wall Street profits and bonuses. (The major firms with over $10 billion in assets.) We all know that our bailouts are responsible for the new wave of record profits that now are returning after the worst financial year since the Great Depression. Every banker knows that a year ago Wall Street was in shambles after it took excessive risks that crashed our economy. Since then, we've rescued the entire financial sector from certain destruction with trillions of dollars in TARP funds and asset guarantees. Now Wall Street must contribute back to our nation in order to put Americans back to work. We will remove the windfall profits tax as soon as unemployment goes below 5 percent.
- For the rest of us who want to contribute, we will be issuing new US Jobs Bonds. These long-term savings bonds would have a modest interest rate, pegged to stay above inflation. But every penny collected would be used to create jobs right now. This voluntary program is a way for all of you to help during this jobs emergency.
- And finally, as Commander in Chief, I am ordering a pullout from Afghanistan over the next two years. We do not have the resources to rebuild that country and to win an un-winnable war. We need to spend our money at home
It is time to put our people to work. No more trickle-down. No more billionaire bailouts. We need real jobs, right now and this emergency plan will do it.
The era of "greed is good" must end. This is the time for shared sacrifice toward shared gain. This is the time to pull together for the common good. Let us join together to put America back to work."
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
Follow Les Leopold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/les_leopold
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Excellent suggestions, Obama seriously needs to take these steps.
Further, I'd add that all for-profit corporations should now have to disclose all their finances with the transparancey all nonprofits must do in order to maintain their tax exempt status. The saying is sunlight is the best disinfectant.
For all those who continue to lambaste Obama for being a tool of Goldman Sachs, you should remember that GS was the major donor of all the candidates. Whichever had been elected, McCain, Clinton or Obama, we would have ended up with a President that owed a great deal to Goldman Sachs.
If you want to see the result of these tax surcharges, go to Cuba and eat a one of the paladares (restaurants people operate out of their homes). They can operate it as a business, but profits are taxed close to 100%. So, they spend all the money they make to turn their homes into incredibly lavish paradises in the middle of a crumbling city. It is a "business expense", and they can write it all off. So, if you want to see the lobby of Goldman Sachs plated in gold and the corporate junket to go from offensive to entirely obscene, then this is a great policy.
The wing-nuts decrying every government program as socialist, communist, fascism is pure lunacy. But then again so is actually instituting socialism to save capitalism.
You seem to imply that we cannot have a managed economy that operates without abuse. I believe we cannot have a fair and honest economy that operates for the benefit of all of the people unless it is managed. The key is to think things through before acting and to be sure the managers are people of integrity and good judgement.
RE: "Taking money (aka stealing) from one person and giving to another DOES NOT miraculously create more money and prosperity. All you did was allow the rich person (who by the way got rich because people wanted what they were selling) to spend less and the poor person to spend more."
Do not assume that those who are rich got that way because people wanted what they are selling. Many got rich because they had the power to steal the increased economic productivity of the past 20 years from workers.
Earnings have not gone into the pockets of those who earned it. Perhaps you should think of those increased taxes not as stealing, but as a return of earnings to the people who actually earned them.
Wealth redistribution. I'll tell ya what that means American style- it's called reverse socialism.
We espouse keeping every dollar one makes as "earned",
cutting peoples wages below the level of the living standard,
tax breaks for the extremely wealthy,
bailout money for the incredibly wealthy,
lower taxes for the rich and increases on everyone else,
lending money to banks at 0% interest,
credit card rates of 30%,
a phony housing bubble where the Fed inflated the value of housing to create imaginary economy because Bush couldn't create a job if he wanted to,
borrowed against it with China and now the worth of your home is the equity you took out of it and so is the American economy
Any company can overcharge for their services (banks, telecom, health, education...) because it can sell the overpriced commodity because we are a nation of chiselers who believe we are entitled to huge tax breaks from the government when things go bad for their business, ships jobs over seas, hide earnings in tax shelters off shore and repeatedly cut back on the nature of those services while ever increasing their costs.
The biggest chiseler of all:
Goldman Sachs, people who sit around all day crunching numbers but basically figuring out how to pay themselves more for what little value they provide in return. Much like the presidency of George
Bush, another big chiseler.
If we Americans think that voting for republicans (who are the authors of most, if not all, that is wrong our economic system) will lead us to a better life, then we deserve all the consequences we presently are enduring, and the worst to follow by re-empowering the GOP. The promulgation of this proposition by the media, and the mindless acceptance of it by a culture where most people cannot even name the three branches of government, illustrates the source and extent to all our woes- an ignorant populace arising from its slumber only when larger self interests exceeds its own. This is what happens when people try to "live by bread alone"! This is also why we collectively end up on the short end of the stick, because we fail to realize that ignorance is the "enzyme" (the catalyts) by which we are made poorer and powerless to benefit greed.
We have polls that come out, seemingly, on a weekly basis used by the (media) as barometer to judge people's assessment of the president's job, when their (the people) primary source of information is from that same (media) that is only interested in conflict (the "enzyme" by which it lives and thrives) And then, they (the media) have the gall to recyle their contaminated info back to the people as if the polls represented the body politic's "sound judgement"!
Give me a break!!!
There is no trickle down, we must pull it down- and lots of it!
Someone else may have posted this but I would add:
Tax companies a high penalty tax for outsourcing jobs. Along the same lines of what Joseph Joyal said below regarding NAFTA and GM making their cars here. Do that for outsourced engineers, programmers, QA, help desk personnel, etc.
If those companies wish to leave America, fine. Give tax breaks and help with SBA loans for those companies IN America that get started and take their place. They too, however, would be taxed a high penalty if they outsource jobs.
I bet you there will be people who would be willing to work within this system.
That sums it up.
Obama has worked to protect the Goldman at the expense of the current majority (for what that's worth) and his second term.
Sad.
No, what's sad is that too many people find it easier to embody cultural problems into a single personality, while totally ignoring the true source of political disillusionment- an ignorant body politic! Being a citizen is more than merely viewing a news source, and reducing the anatomy of systemic problems that were decades in the making, to an "M&M" bag of information. And this is exactly what the forces of greed want- to keep those who suffer the most looking for blame and solutions in all the wrong places!
Forget it folks. This presidents last desire is to have a healthy economy. Crisis is home and grabing power through a crisis is his game plan.
This is Obama we are talking about. He has no interest in doing anything but propping up wall street. Watch his actions not his rhetoric.
Lastest poll (Wintrop) University of 11 ***SOUTHERN*** States -
Southerners WANT A FEDERAL JOBS BILL.
Democrats are DOOMED unless this gets going NOW!
Maybe. But it's not like the republicans of the south will create a federal jobs bill anyway.
Too late. 3 strikes and your out.
1. Strike one continued TARP. Yes really Virginia the banks will start lending when we pay all of them off.
2. Strike two stimulus. Yes Virginia 2 + 2 equals a bazillion jobs saved (oops on the 10.2% unemployment).
3. Strike three H1N1. Yes Virginia H1N1 is a national emergency and you have to be vaccinated, but you can't because the Government messed up.
You're out!
I agree with strikes #1 and #2.
The crisis just prior to the election was a chance to steal money. It was a heist.
Raise taxes on the rich until they are no longer. Raise taxes on big companies until they can't make money. Push though cap and trade so we can drive the oil companies out of business. Push through the obama health reform so we can tax businesses even more heavily. Redirtribute ! Redistribute! Redistribute until we are all equally miserable.
No, redistribute until the moneybags are miserable and the rest of us are reasonably happy. What goes up, must come down. You want it to come down gently, as outlined above, or with a crash?
Excellent article ... You hit the nail on the head! America is never going to recover, no matter what the GDP growth rate is. Those that are working are working twice as hard for half as much.
If, there are no jobs except for those going to war, that is a pretty pathetic place for the country and seems to be the direction in which we are headed. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on these endless wars and no one says anything. Eventually, the greed of this will sink the Empire.
Obama is too tied in with the bankers and corporate thugs to even begin to take this sort of bold strategy.
He continues to 'coquette' with Goldman and the rest-
Thus far he has shown no leadership in the style of an FDR, Truman, Kennedy or Johnson.
Obama needs to show an FDR like determination and ebullience- his manner is too subtle and washed out to make any kind of impact on many.
I agree completely...Obama has decided to link himself with the likes of Gheitner and Summers, who have absolutely no intention of caring about getting jobs for average Americans, but instead wish to see Wall Street once again act as the blood suckers they are with the American taxpayer.
The proposals Les makes are great ones, and one Obama should be following through on...I am deeply cynical about him even considering such intelligent and necessary solutions...
Les is right that Obama might as well just turn over the Congress to the Republicans if the job market continues to struggle...yes, I know, it takes some time for jobs to come back...but the American people are an impatient lot, and their tolerance for waiting is not too good right now.
The American people will endure a lot of things but not having jobs is not one of them. Anyone who thinks the dems will remain in power with 10% unemployment is smoking crack. If I were Obama I wld come up with a jobs program and DARE the repubs to vote against it and I wld do it before election nite 2010.
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