Washington, December 09: US President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled a new program designed to ignite jobs growth and fight the “human tragedy” of high unemployment, while vowing to control the exploding deficit.
Obama rolled out a package of tax breaks, infrastructure investment and spending on energy efficiency intended to bite into the crisis which has seen millions of Americans thrown out of work and the jobless rate hit 10 percent.
He also blamed Republicans for causing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, as he made a clear attempt to define the battlefield on job creation and deficit reduction ahead of a crucial political year.
“There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other,” Obama said in a speech at the Brookings Institution.
“But this is a false choice,” said Obama, who balanced a tone of stark truth-telling on the economy with controlled optimism over the slowing rise in new jobs lost and a moderate return to growth.
Obama announced that he would wind down the unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) used to bailout Wall Street firms many people blamed for igniting the economic firestorm.
Some of the billions of dollars in funds would be diverted to job creation efforts, especially to free up frozen credit hampering the capacity of small businesses to expand and hire new workers.
Some fiscal hawks propose using all unspent or repaid TARP money to pay down the deficit, but Obama argued the need was still acute for job creation.
“Even though we have reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who have been swept up in the flood,” Obama said.
“There are more than seven million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began.
“That’s a staggering figure and one that reflects not only the depths of the hole from which we must ascend, but also a continuing human tragedy,” Obama said.
He did not give details as to the cost of the likely jobs measures.
But Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader of the House of Representatives, said a jobs bill could cost as much as 150 billion dollars.
“One hundred billion, 150 billion, 75 billion — those are all figures that are being talked about, depending on what the component parts are,” Hoyer said.
“We need to do the jobs bill right. And we need to do it soon.”
But Obama also promised to use some of the 200 billion dollars in cost savings on TARP to rein in the deficit, forecast at 1.3 trillion dollars next year.
“Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run,” Obama said.
–Agencies