Business leaders, Bay Area officials praise Obama’s jobs plan
When it is a question of taxes, gentlemen, prove their usefulness by reasons with some foundation, but not with that lamentable assertion: “Public spending keeps the working class alive.” It makes the mistake of covering up a fact that it is essential to know: namely, that public spending is always a substitute for private spending, and that consequently it may well support one worker in place of another but adds nothing to the lot of the working class taken as a whole. Your argument is fashionable, but it is quite absurd, for the reasoning is not correct.
read bastiat, confirm the logic, then be rattled to your core that the same colossal preening lying dumbbells and their inferior sheep still exist ~160 years after he destroyed them on the field of intellect. it is not intellect that survived. cheerleading from the whatever “estate”? yes, that survived:
Business leaders and Bay Area public officials praised President Barack Obama’s call Tuesday to reduce the nation’s persistent double-digit unemployment through a major federal spending effort to improve roads, bolster small businesses and make homes more energy-efficient.Under intense political pressure because more than 7 million Americans have lost jobs over the past two years and despite Republican criticism over the rising deficit, Obama called the nation’s 10 percent jobless rate “staggering” and said the U.S. must continue to “spend our way out of the recession.”
Although Obama didn’t specify how much the plan would cost, experts said it would doubtless involve tens of billions of dollars, which local government officials said was sorely needed.
“I’m euphoric about it,” said Dan Collen, Santa Clara County’s deputy director for roads and airports, who said the county has $160 million of high-priority road needs, including improvements to its extensive network of expressways. And if the state tries to grab some county money to ease its own budget woes, “we may need all of the stimulus-for-jobs or whatever money is available just to keep the routine baseline operations going,” said Collen.
With congressional approval required for the plan, it’s unclear how much it would cost and how many jobs might be created. Nonetheless, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed issued a statement saying the idea was bound to help.
“Here in San Jose, the number of residents experiencing unemployment skyrocketed over the last year — from 6.7 percent in 2008 to 13.2 percent as of October 2009,” he said. “These proposals have the potential to put people back to work.”
Local experts said most of the road-related jobs that would be created by the plan would be at private companies hired by cities and counties to do the work, much of which might involve fixing potholes and other maintenance.
Santa Cruz needs about $30 million just to repair its streets, said Mark Dettle, that city’s public works director. And in San Jose, the deferred street-maintenance bill has swollen in recent years to about $270 million, according to Deputy Transportation Director Kevin O’Connor, who added that “the concern is it could be getting worse.”
Besides helping finance highway and bridge construction, the president’s plan proposes a tax cut for small businesses that hire in 2010 and an elimination for one year of the capital gains tax on profits from small-business investments.
That drew cheers from Betty Jo Toccoli, president of the California Small Business Association.
“It’s about time,” she said. “It’s scary what’s going on.”
Toccoli noted that the state over the past five years has lost about 400,000 small businesses, each with an average of eight workers, while only a smattering of predominately single-person businesses have been started during the same period.
Obama also proposed new tax breaks for energy-efficient retrofits in homes. Some administration officials have dubbed the idea “Cash for Caulkers,” saying it is similar to the now-expired Cash for Clunkers rebates offered to car owners who traded their vehicles for more fuel-efficient models.
That could prove a windfall for companies such as Serious Materials of Sunnyvale, which does such retrofits.
“We’re very pleased,” said CEO Kevin Surace. “Everyone wants to save energy, but no one has the money to put upfront for it now.”
While Obama did not propose the kind of direct federal public works jobs that were created in the 1930s, he said government action could set the stage for more job creation by private business. Many of his proposals would extend or expand programs included in the mammoth $787 billion stimulus package passed last winter.
To find money to pay for the new programs, the administration is pointing to the Treasury Department report Monday that it expects to get back $200 billion in taxpayer-approved bank bailout funds faster than expected.
Obama suggested this windfall from the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program “would help the government spend money on job creation at the same time it eats into the nation’s debt, which now totals $12 trillion.”
But Republicans cried foul, claiming the leftover and repaid money must be used exclusively for deficit reduction or additional bank bailouts, as the law setting it up spells out, and not for an expensive new stimulus program to create jobs.
Although the unemployment rate inched down to 10 percent in November from 10.2 percent in October, more of America’s largest companies will shrink their staffs than will hire in the next six months, according to a new survey by the Business Roundtable. And the job situation in California is expected to remain bleak for some time, according to a report due to be made public today by UCLA economists.
The report by the UCLA Anderson School of Management predicts that the state won’t be generating enough jobs to drive the unemployment rate below double digits until 2012.
word to your mutha:
[...]
Public Works
Nothing is more natural than that a nation, after making sure that a great enterprise will profit the community, should have such an enterprise carried out with funds collected from the citizenry. But I lose patience completely, I confess, when I hear alleged in support of such a resolution this economic fallacy: “Besides, it is a way of creating jobs for the workers.”
The state opens a road, builds a palace, repairs a street, digs a canal; with these projects it gives jobs to certain workers. That is what is seen. But it deprives certain other laborers of employment. That is what is not seen.
Suppose a road is under construction. A thousand laborers arrive every morning, go home every evening, and receive their wages; that is certain. If the road had not been authorized, if funds for it had not been voted, these good people would have neither found this work nor earned these wages; that again is certain.
But is this all? Taken all together, does not the operation involve something else? At the moment when M. Dupin pronounces the sacramental words: “The Assembly has adopted, ….” do millions of francs descend miraculously on a moonbeam into the coffers of M. Fould and M. Bineau? For the process to be complete, does not the state have to organize the collection of funds as well as their expenditure? Does it not have to get its tax collectors into the country and its taxpayers to make their contribution?
Study the question, then, from its two aspects. In noting what the state is going to do with the millions of francs voted, do not neglect to note also what the taxpayers would have done—and can no longer do—with these same millions. You see, then, that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. On one, the figure of a busy worker, with this device: What is seen; on the other, an unemployed worker, with this device: What is not seen.
The sophism that I am attacking in this essay is all the more dangerous when applied to public works, since it serves to justify the most foolishly prodigal enterprises. When a railroad or a bridge has real utility, it suffices to rely on this fact in arguing in its favor. But if one cannot do this, what does one do? One has recourse to this mumbo jumbo: “We must create jobs for the workers.” [...]
here’s a job: leave us.