President Obama's Job Creation Mirage by Dean Baker

[Better Believe It]

President Obama's Job Creation Mirage
We've heard plenty about Obama's post Labor Day job creation speech, but will it contain anything that might actually work?
by Dean Baker
August 29, 2011

President Obama has discovered how serious the recession is. That's what he told an audience in Chicago last week. To be fair, he was referring to revised data from the commerce department showing that the falloff in GDP was larger than originally reported.

But ridicule is appropriate. He and we knew all along how many people were out of work. The employment numbers told us the size of the hole and the desperate need for government action.

This sort of ridiculous comment, and President Obama's weak response to the recession over the first two and a half years of his presidency, explains the tidal wave of scepticism facing his widely hyped upcoming speech on jobs after the Labor Day weekend. The list of remedies leaked ahead of time does little to inspire hope.

At the top of the list of job-creating measures is extending the 2 percentage-point reduction in the social security payroll tax. This provides no boost to the economy, since it just keeps in place a tax cut that was already there, but if the cut is allowed to end at the start of 2012, it will be a drag on growth.

Read the full article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/29/president-obama-job-creation