Congress has a shot at passing jobs-creating bills

As Congress left for its August recess, the president had signed only 27 bills into law since this session opened in January. Some, such as the just-passed bill to raise the debt ceiling and a bill to extend Patriot Act provisions, were important. But most were more routine — five bills to name post offices or federal buildings, three to name members of the Smithsonian board of regents and four to keep federal airport operations running.

Arguably, not one contributed to job growth. Republicans say that spending cuts in a 2011 budget act and the debt act will stimulate the private sector. Democrats retort that reductions in federal investment in infrastructure and new technology are job killers.

lendmeflight2 wrote:Infrastructure is the only thing you can do if you want to create a jobs program. You could give it to private companies to hire people but they would just lay people off when the money stopped coming.

This is how an infrastructure stimulus would save us.

You spend money, lot's of it, on building up infrastructure. I would prefer it to be done entirely by the government but the republicans would insist on it being by private companies. That's fine as long as it's regulated. You spend the money rebuilding bridges and rails and roads. This puts contractors and construction workers back to work. They need supplies. This puts lumber and concrete and other building material companies back to work. This puts money in the economy that the workers who were unemployed are now spending. This restarts the retail business. Retail needs to hire more people to meet the demand. the rise in retail hiring puts MORE people back to work and those people spend even more money and pay more in taxes. This depletion of retail goods requires a business to order more and spend money to do it. This stimulates every industry that people spend money in. All of these industries have to hire even more people because the demand is higher. These things have to be delivered so they have to hire more truck drivers. The increase in business requires more wear and tear on computer systems so more programers are needed and so on and so on.

This is, was from the start, Obama's idea to improve the economy. It has been halted at every turn by the republicans. It only takes ONE single republican in the senate to stop any bill. There needs to be more unemployment benefits for everyone but it's pretty late now and we have basically wasted three years. We are still starting out where we were in January of 2009. The only way this will work is to draw a line under where we were and start from where we are.
Pass another stimulus to pay for infrastructure and more benefits and the economy will improve in a year. Once it starts it will be an exponential growth that will build like a snowball faster and faster as it goes. However, they can't make the same mistake as they did the first time and make almost half of it tax cuts and let the states administer it. It needs to be administered by the federal government and none of it can be tax cuts.


So tell me how crazy I am.