President Proposes a Plan for Jobs

President Barack Obama spoke before a joint session of Congress last night, proposing a plan to create jobs. 

Much political ado had been made over the past week, particularly over the scheduling and the anticipated attendance of the speech.  Initially, the White House scheduled it to coincide with the Republican debate on Wednesday evening, causing no small amount of disgruntlement among Republicans, who would have had to quickly reschedule the debate, were it not for an unprecedented letter from House Speaker John Boehner to the White House, claiming that the date and time of the scheduled speech conflicted with pre-scheduled House voting.  Hence, the speech was rescheduled for last night, then rescheduled again, so as not to conflict with the first official game commencing football season.  As if tensions weren't high enough, already, some Republican Congresional representatives voiced their indifference to the media to even attending the speech, opting instead to watch the football game.  Affronted by the Republican speech-skippers indifference, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid astutely scheduled the procedural vote to disapprove the debt ceiling increase to commence immediatly after the speech.

It was then no wonder that in the preamble of the speech itself, the President referred to the "political circus" that characterizes Washington, these days.

In summary, the President's roughly $450 billion plan proposes--
--a significant reduction in employer payroll taxes, to make it cheaper for businesses to hire
--spending on infrastructure and education, to provide for construction and teaching jobs
--funds to retain teachers in budget-crunched states and retrain the long-term unemloyed, and
--a broad-based tax cut in 2012, to put more money in people's pockets.

Although stipulating that "everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything," the detail of precisely where the money to pay for the plan wasn't so clear.  The President expects to deliver that apparently minor detail to Congress next week.  At this point, it is assumed that it will be paid for with the budget cuts to be laid out by Congresses' special committee before December 31 of this year.

In regards to the delivery of the speech, notable was the President's tone, through which, he was adamant that the bill, called the "American Jobs Act" (though it's not officially an "act" until it is passed and signed), be "passed right away."  In fact, he used the phrase, "right away" eight times.

We'll let you draw your own conclusions from all that.

... and It Keeps Getting Worse ...

Quite possibly the most important element of any economy is whether or not people have a job. 

Well, not to say that it was entirely unexpected, but unemployment has gotten worse, especially here in California, where, the U.S. Department of Labor reports, is back up to 12 percent, second-highest in the nation, exceeded only by Nevada.  Nationally, unemployment is down a tick, to 9.1 percent, from 9.2 percent in July.  And to be clear, these numbers don't include the discouraged and under-employed, which would likely add another ten points or so to that, at least in California. Totalled, that's almost a quarter of the workforce.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans is even higher, as nationally, 15.9 percent of blacks are without work.  Evidence for this could be seen in Georgia today, where, according to ABC News, "thousands camp[ed] out in their business suits and office heels and brav[ed] the tormenting heat in Atlanta to stand in line for a job fair" sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus.  Authorities had to treat 20 people for heat exhaustion. 

To make matters even worse, Bank of America, one of those Corporations once called, "too big to fail", announced plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs in it's endeavors to restructure.  This is on top of roughly 2,500 job cuts already this year for BofA.

On the brighter side (in an attempt to find a brighter side, amidst such bleak news of late), to be sure, unemployment isn't as high as the national rate everywhere.  North Dakota's unemployment is at a meager 3.3 percent.  Nebraska's is only 4.1 percent.  And South Dakota's stands at 4.7 percent.  Only thing is, there are more people in California than there are in all three states combined.  Maybe the reason why there are so many unemployed, is because so few people want to live there.