Can Obama create 2.5 million jobs?
President-elect Obama wants his economic team to develop a plan to create 2.5 million jobs by January 2011. Such a plan has the virtue of providing a specific goal -- and with 1.2 million jobs lost so far this year and more on the way, such a goal would more than offset the lost jobs.
But setting the goal and achieving it are two different things. In the next two months, Obama's economic team -- which will reportedly be announced on Monday -- will need to flesh out the details of a strategy to achieve this goal. And these details will involve using government money to rebuild roads and bridges, upgrade schools and build wind farms and alternative energy technologies.
If Obama is to achieve his goal, he will need to get legislation passed soon after he takes the oath of office. And the legislation will need to provide concrete answers to many questions: Which projects will the government invest in? How many jobs will the projects produce? How much money will be required to finance these projects? Where will the money come from? What profits will these projects generate? How soon will the government get its investment paid back? How much economic growth will these projects create?
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment