Liberal Democrat

Liberal Democrat
Individual Freedom For Everyone

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Jan Shakowsky: 'Announces Bill to Create 2.2 Million Jobs'

Source:U.S. Representative Jan Shakowsky (Democrat, Illinois) talking about her jobs plan.

"Representative Jan Schakowsky talks about her new Jobs Bill which will hire two million Americans to address our jobs crisis." 

From Jan Shakowski 

The so-called House Progressive Caucus (Democratic Socialists of America, in actuality) developed a similar plan back in the April during the official House debate on the budget. That got around forty votes in a 435 Member House, which should give you a pretty good idea of how many people voted against it. Not all of the forty-five members or so of the so-called Progressive Caucus in the House voted for it, they weren't even united behind their own plan. 

The CPC plan back in April also had a tax hike of over 1T$ in it including on the middle class when they can least afford it in this bad economy. Where they are struggling just to pay their current bills, so a new tax bill doesn't make that any easier. 

I'll give Representative Jan Shakowski credit for not putting in a middle class tax hike in her latest plan. But her jobs plan is essentially centered around creating new Federal Government jobs, creating all of these new Federal agencies to go out and hire all of these new people to do these public works. And have very little if anything to create jobs in the private sector thats hurting right now, people who actually have to meet payrolls and live within budgets or risk going out of business. 

The private sector is not like the Federal Government that controls the national currency and can just borrow and spend to pay for its operations, because they can print money. Had Representative Schakowski's (great name by the way especially for someone from Chicago, but thats a different story) had her plan been centered around fixing and expanding infrastructure in America, then I would have a lot more respect for it. 

And then we also need tax cuts to encourage consumer spending which is where the real weakness in our economy economic growth (or the lack of it) because not enough people in America are spending enough money for us to have enough economic growth to create enough jobs to bring down our unemployment rate. 

The debt and deficit are big issues in the economy today as well because they relate to the weakness of our dollar with all the money we owe other nations, but without a strong economy, we'll never be able to bring down our debt and deficit to the point where we can manage it in a healthy way.

A solid economic plan to me is in the neighborhood of around 1-2T$ over five years thats centered around infrastructure, like a National Infrastructure Bank that I've mentioned and pushed before that I'll being doing again in the future. That repairs and builds roads, bridges, airports, waterways, schools, etc. With kids going back to school in the next few weeks, now would be a perfect time to spend 50B$ or so right now on fixing and building new schools.

A NIB could finance all of these projects through the private sector and then hire private companies to do the work and then they would hire the workers to do the work. As well as focusing on our consumer spending (or the lack of it) with tax cuts for the middle class to do that, like a payroll tax cut or a consumer tax credit, a tax credit that people would have to spend automatically and make it big enough to make a difference. 

And then passing the Central America, Columbia and Korea trade deals that are stuck in Congress, so we can start exporting again. But then pay for this entire plan and not put it on the national debt card.

What we need right now as a country more than anything else and we need a lot, is job growth where we are creating around 200K jobs a month again. And the only way to do this is through economic growth of around 4-5%. And to do this we need start building and exporting things again. And as people we need to start spending money again, not expanding the Federal Government.