Written by Janet
Well, he signed his infamous health care bill, and made an arms reduction deal with Russia, bypasses Republicans with his 15 “recess appointees”, sneaks into Afghanistan at dark, all in one week. So now Obama has set his sights on immigration, finance, and education reform. But the administration still is not moving to tackle the economic slump with the same fervor it applied to health care reform.
Congress and the administration made an incremental, stopgap step toward addressing jobs concerns with the $38 billion package of tax breaks for businesses and infrastructure spending signed by Obama March 18. But it was scaled down, nowhere near the original size. Though jobless figures show the unemployment crisis easing — gone are the monthly losses in the scores or hundreds of thousands — the president continues to face pressure to make a big move on the economy.
The director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Larry Sabato said Obama had a great week and the polls reflect a temporary bump for him — but that health care reform will remain as controversial as it’s ever been and the economy will continue to be the overriding concern in November.
Late last year the administration said mainly on the agenda was a Washington jobs summit and the start of a jobs-focused Obama tour, but that was soon replaced by a bipartisan health care summit and a new cross-country presidential tour to sell the benefits of the health care package to the public.
Although the jobless rates are leveling off, the numbers don’t show a pickup in hiring. The unemployment rate for February held steady at 9.7 percent. And for the one step forward the latest jobs measure might represent, Republicans argue health care reform was two steps back at a volatile time.
Democrats appear to be linking their other agenda items to the economy, arguing — as Obama did with health care reform — that pursuing reforms in other areas will ultimately be done for the greater economic good. The fact is, it’s been well over a year since the near collapse of the entire financial system — a crisis that helped wipe out more than 8 million jobs and that continues to exact a terrible toll throughout our economy. Yet today the very same system that allowed this turmoil remains in place.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is now pitching immigration reform as a matter of economic well-being. He said there are at least 15,000 crossing our borders everyday, taking the jobs away from Americans. And yet at the same time there are certain people we need in this economy to help us grow and we can’t get them: engineers, doctors, farm workers.
DreadPirateRoberts
/ 03/31/2010The Marxist believe is that to build you have first to destroy. How do you make a Capitalist nation accept Marxism? You have to make Capitalism so unworkable and the populace so miserable as to accept the counter belief as the only alternative.
Why Amnesty for illegals? It seems obvious that the Democrats see only one chance at all out destruction in November, and that is to import voters who will sell their votes for a handful of benefits. This is tantamount to a soft tyranny by subverting the electorate, and might be a violation of the Constitution’s imperitive to protect the nation from all threats “Foreign and domestic”. But who ever said that the Democrats were a party who cared for the voter? They think of them as a bunch of rubes.