When President Barack Obama sold his $787 billion stimulus package to the American people, he set one metric for success: jobs. Specifically, President Obama promised the American people he would create 4.1 million jobs by the end of 2010. According to the President’s plan, the stimulus should have lowered the nation’s unemployment rate below 8% by this August. That is the objective standard the President set for himself. And according to objective data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, President Obama’s policies, and his stimulus package, have been …
During yesterday’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Rep. John Mica (R-FL) claimed: “Every billion dollars in spending on infrastructure, on highway and transportation expenditures does result in 35,000 new jobs.” Too bad Mica wasn’t listening to the Ways and Means Hearing across the hall where economist Alan Viard told the committee: “Changes in infrastructure spending are not an effective method of creating jobs or providing short-run fiscal stimulus to the economy.” The Washington Post further reports: “Viard is a former Bush administration economist now at the American Enterprise Institute. But …
It looks more and more like Joe the Plumber was on to something about taxes, though you wouldn’t know if from most of the polls and media. The Heritage Foundation has the details in our new study: If a President McCain got his way on tax reform, Americans could expect to see jobs, the economy and their own disposable income grow much faster than if a President Obama were to push through his proposals. As this chart shows, the economy would grow by $320 billion more in 10 years under …
Joe the Plumber helped reshape the presidential debate around the issue of taxes. So how do the two candidates’ proposals compare? What plan is better for the economy and job creation? Rea Hederman, senior policy analyst and assistant director of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, explains the differences between Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s tax plans. Hederman wrote a detailed analysis of the proposals last week. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZWuT81X93I[/youtube]
In today’s Washington Post, Peterson Institute for International Economics director C. Fred Bergsten looks at anti-trade rhetoric emanating from the campaign trail and responds: [T]heir tone obscures a major success story: the dramatic improvement in our balance of international trade. This export boom has saved us from recession over the past year and, despite the recent financial turmoil, is likely to continue doing so. It is generating at least 2 million new and high-paying jobs, about half of them from increased foreign sales by the beleaguered manufacturing sector. Fresh evidence …
Yesterday we detailed why Barack Obama’s high-tax/high-spending plan to grow the economy was doomed to fail. On the spending side we highlighted that Obama promises to spend $60 billion on infrastructure that he claims will create 2 million new jobs. In addition to pointing out that some studies concluded that these new jobs would come at the cost of losses elsewhere in the economy, we did note that one Department of Transportation computer model did predict that for every $1 billion in highway spending, 47,576 jobs would be created for …
