Clinton's Republican-Lite messaging was dead wrong, and so is Barack Obama's

[HomerRamone]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/richard-eskow/55798/amid-deep-job-losses-whos-fighting-for-government-workers

Given the growth of the population, stagnating wages, persistent long-term unemployment, and a host of other factors, we should be adding twice as many jobs per month as we are currently seeing. Instead, government -- the one area of our economic life over which politicians have direct control -- is shedding jobs, instead of adding them. This worsens the overall economy while depriving the public of much-needed government services.

What's more, the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that it will take $3.6 trillion to restore our nation's infrastructure. We need the jobs, and the infrastructure needs repair. The president and his party should be hammering the message home every day: we need government jobs, and we need them now.

President Obama should be fighting to preserve current public-sector jobs and create new ones. Instead he's given to repeatedly boasting, as he does in his latest budget proposal, about the fact that under his proposal "discretionary spending will fall to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years."

<...>

Politicians who seek populist/progressive support should stop repeating the antigovernment nostrums of the right and start challenging them instead. It's time for genuine leaders to push for a bold public-sector jobs program, fearlessly and without cynicism. And it's time for someone to defend the hard-working employees in the public sector -- human beings who contribute as much to our well-being as working people in any other walk of life.

[ProSense]

1. First of all,

Given the growth of the population, stagnating wages, persistent long-term unemployment, and a host of other factors, we should be adding twice as many jobs per month as we are currently seeing. Instead, government -- the one area of our economic life over which politicians have direct control -- is shedding jobs, instead of adding them. This worsens the overall economy while depriving the public of much-needed government services.

What's more, the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that it will take $3.6 trillion to restore our nation's infrastructure. We need the jobs, and the infrastructure needs repair. The president and his party should be hammering the message home every day: we need government jobs, and we need them now.

President Obama should be fighting to preserve current public-sector jobs and create new ones. Instead he's given to repeatedly boasting, as he does in his latest budget proposal, about the fact that under his proposal "discretionary spending will fall to its lowest level as a share of the economy in more than 50 years."

...the public sector job losses have been at the state and local level, driven by Republicans.

From the OP piece.

The outlier is Barack Obama. 710,000 public-sector jobs -- that's nearly ¾ of a million -- have been lost since Obama took office.

President Obama is not the architect of these losses. Most of them have taken place at the state and local level, although Federal jobs are now gaining a larger share of the losses. At every level, job loss has been fueled by Republican-backed cuts and stymied by conservative hostility toward government jobs.

Krugman: States of Depression
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002385152

Secondly, Obama has enacted policies that helped to significantly reduce the deficit by eliminating abuse and fraud. Spending cuts have been in the form of savings.

Thirdly, the President constantly talks about and offers proposals to fund public sector jobs and rebuild the infrastructure.

"The day the right lost the economic argument...President Obama's speech clinched the case..."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023344918

His "latest budget proposal" includes infrastructure spending, funding for universal pre-K and more.

FACT SHEET: President Obama Lays Out Vision for 21st Century Transportation Infrastructure

On February 26th, the President will speak at the historic Union Depot train station in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he will launch a competition for $600 million in competitive transportation funding and outline his vision for investing in America’s infrastructure with a $302 billion, four year surface transportation reauthorization proposal. The President will continue to act when he can to promote job growth in the transportation sector and put more Americans back to work repairing and modernizing our roads, bridges, railways, and transit systems, and will also work with Congress to act to ensure critical transportation programs continue to be funded and do not expire later this year.

- more -

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/26/fact-sheet-president-obama-lays-out-vision-21st-century-transportation-i

Obama to unveil $300 billion transportation infrastructure plan
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024567593

[Thinkingabout]

3. K & R

[Gman]

9. Thanks for mentioning this

[OnlinePoker]

12. "Federal jobs are now gaining a larger share of the losses"

Only if you count the Post Office numbers. If you don't, federal government employment has gone from 2.035 million in Jan 2009 to 2.120 million in Jan 2014 (Not Seas Adj). If you look at the Post Office, its employment has dropped from 736 thousand to 590 thousand in the same period, but that was dropping even before Obama took office. A large number of the lost jobs (nearly 300,000 have come from local education cutbacks).

http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm

(This is a good BLS data miner as you can compare sectors or individual job types and get the data back to 2004)

[Thinkingabout]

2. If the problem was Obama on creating jobs to repair and upgrade our

Infrastructure it would already happened. The do nothing Congress whose first order
is to delay and deny is fulfilling their useless time. If the Koch brothers owned d the road construction companies the jobs would be rolling. If the effort to build a road in Afghanistan been directed towards our infrastructure we would be well into accomplishing our results. If $14M been directed towards building our infrastructure instead of being wasted on a flawed Benghazi investigation, we would have paid towards the cost of repairs. If fifty votes to repeal Obamacare been skipped and time spent on putting getting infrastructure bills passed,we would be working now. I am being nasty to our troops but this is a group of able bodies capable of building our infrastructure, giving them good jobs with decent salaries to support their families and American citizens would receive the fruits of their labor. This is a Congress of misdirection, do nothing useless group we could do without.

[Scuba]

8. Apparently the bully pulpit was dismantled in January, 2009.

I wonder how much that had to do with 2010.

[KoKo]

4. Recommend Read...

[BrotherIvan]

5. Here comes the denial brigade

[wyldwolf]

6. Regarding ProSense's reply (#1)

I find it amazing how hyper-partisan pieces like the OP's can take a surface knowledge of events, twist it to meet a per-concieved conclusion, then feed it to hungry ravenous 'base' and they snap it up like hungry wolves. It's like I said in an anti-Hillary post yesterday, If Clinton (and Obama) are so bad, why do some people feel they have to make things up and/or intentionally twist the facts?

[Sheepshank]

7. oh god...another cherry picked set of accusations low on fact

and big on Obama = Republican.

Thanks for nothing.

[m-lekktor]

10. thank you. exactly. nt

[Gman]

11. I can only conclude it is chic to call the Clintons & Obama

Republican lites. It shows everyone you don't care about facts, you're one of the in crowd, and you adhere to the purist line more than anyone.

Smirking Chimp never was very useful.

[stonecutter357]

13. I don't care how much hell you raise, I am going to vote for Hillary.

[leftstreet]

14. What happened to the big 'Green Jobs' campaign plan?

[ProSense]

15. Well,

"What happened to the big 'Green Jobs' campaign plan?"

...people tend to ignore the facts in favor of spin.

Huge thermal plant opens as solar industry grows
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024493290

U.S. Approves Two Huge Solar Projects On Public Lands In California
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024547836

DOE: U.S. Wind Energy Production and Manufacturing Reaches Record Highs
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023420471

[HomerRamone]

16. Obama accepts Reagan framing:"less government is better"-the point ignored by most in this thread nt

[Progressive dog]

17. Apparently the Reagan Republicans didnt get Obama's message,

it's fortunate that we have "Democrats" who heard it.
This is 2013, from "Forbes"

President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.