Last month, Barack Obama announced that he would be proposing an economic plan to “save or create” 2.5 million jobs over two years.
Yesterday, he gave a few more details:
On the heels of more grim unemployment news, President-elect Barack Obama yesterday offered the first glimpse of what would be the largest public works program since President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the federal interstate system in the 1950s.
Obama said the massive government spending program he proposes to lift the country out of economic recession will include a renewed effort to make public buildings energy-efficient, rebuild the nation’s highways, renovate aging schools and install computers in classrooms, extend high-speed Internet to underserved areas and modernize hospitals by giving them access to electronic medical records.
“We need to act with the urgency this moment demands to save or create at least 2 1/2 million jobs so that the nearly 2 million Americans who’ve lost them know that they have a future,” Obama said in his weekly address, broadcast on the radio and the Internet.
Obama offered few details and no cost estimate for the investment in public infrastructure. But it is intended to be part of a broader effort to stimulate economic activity that will also include tax cuts for middle-class Americans and direct aid to state governments to forestall layoffs as programs shrink.
There isn’t much more to say about this that I didn’t say when Obama first came out with this proposal, but Ryan Young makes an excellent point about one of his proposals:
One of his ideas is to install energy-efficient light bulbs in federal office buildings.
In other words, we’re about to find out exactly how many federal employees it takes to screw in a light bulb.
My guess: a lot.
Yea, which probably means that government employment, which is already one of the few job sectors showing growth at the moment, will increase under an Obama Administration.
Too bad government employees don’t actually produce anything of value.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
“Don’t produce anything of value.”
And whose fault is that ? Everything under the sun that could be ‘privatized’ has had that done. What do you end up with ? Endless user fees and sweetheart contracts.
It got so nuts media tried to control access to weather reports…which are generated at public expense !
Ditto a lot of pharmaceutical research BTW, though I’m not counting plastic surgery !
To you I might as well be a commie socialist – while to me your attitudes towards just ‘using what works’ violate every principle of good management.