President Obama to discuss job creation

After the ever-rising unemployment rate skyrocketed into double digits in October, doubts about the Obama Administration’s ability to cope with joblessness grew.  Such worries intensified when it was revealed that estimates of nearly one hundred thousand of the jobs supposedly “created or saved” by the $787 billion stimulus package were in question.  According to a recent CBS News poll, only 7 percent of Americans believe that the stimulus has actually created any jobs at all.


Now, President Obama is looking to ease the fears of the public by refocusing his agenda around job creation.  Later today, Mr. Obama will be hosting a “job summit” to discuss ways to get Americans back to work.


“We are going to be bringing together people from all across the country … to explore how we can jumpstart the hiring that typically lags behind economic growth, but we don’t want to wait,” the president said. “We want to see if we can accelerate it.”


One measure that it has been suggested could get job creation back on track is the passage of yet another government spending bill:


With unemployment in double digits for the first time in decades, Democratic lawmakers are suggesting a second economic stimulus aimed directly at job creation may be needed.


This idea makes more than a few Americans uneasy and rightly so.


Just 10 days before taking office, Obama’s top economic advisers [Christina Romer & Jared Bernstein] released a report predicting unemployment would remain at eight percent or below through this year if an economic stimulus plan won congressional approval.


Now, unemployment is at 10.2 percent and the same government that told us that spending $787 billion in taxpayer money would spur job creation is telling us that it is going to take more government spending to spur job creation.  And while the president hosts a summit to discuss joblessness, millions of unemployed Americans are left to wonder: where are the jobs that we were promised the stimulus would deliver?