Congress Must Play Ball with President Obama's Jobs Plan

Atlanta Job Fair Crowd
Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal & Constitution, via Associated Press

As a proud Obama-crat who is still pulling for the President and the nation to succeed in engineering an economic turnaround, I have been reading with significant interest about the President's recently announced American Jobs Act. With a full week's analysis under my belt, I have concluded that the so-called experts (economists and executives) have no idea what the ultimate impact might be of the President's proposed legislation.

My initial instinct was that with President Obama's jobs speech last week he may not have scored a touchdown, but he had at least finally sketched out a play and huddled us up. If we work together, we might just move the ball down the field after all.

Within hours (or minutes) though, the tiny bit of momentum the President might have gained was threatened, as Republican party leaders indicated that less than half of the President's bill would ever stand at chance at becoming law. That's ok though, that means half of the proposed legislation could still make it through the intricate maze of the congressional labyrinth and positively impact our economic well-being.

The day after the President's jobs plan was announced American "big business" piled on with the nay-saying Republican leadership. An article in the New York Times reported that executives from various industries doubted the impact of the provisions in the President's plan, saying that things like payroll tax cuts and related incentives are not likely to spur any additional hiring. According to these executives, if companies were going to hire new workers, they would need to see increased consumer confidence and increased demand for their products and services, plain and simple.

Okay, the President had drawn up a play, and he had huddled the offense in the middle of the field to share the details, but before he even approached the line of scrimmage, penalty flags flew and we were pushed back another ten yards. No worries, we still have a play. In today's New York Times, a different set of experts, economists this time and not executives, have forecast that parts of the President's bill could stimulate significant economic growth (and thus new jobs). According to some estimates, the incentives and programs included in the President's job's bill could generate up to 150,000 jobs per month. Awesome, now it will only take a literal act of Congress and the full cooperation of the Federal Reserve to make it all happen.

The truth, it seems, is that none of us knows what it will take to restart vigorous job growth and restore vibrancy to the American economy. If the answers were simple or easy to enact, even Washington could probably have done it by now.

President Obama has stepped up though, as good leaders do, and he has explicitly spelled out a plan of attack. We've broken the huddle, and the President has now stepped up to center. The next big question that must be answered is what our elected officials in Congress will do. Will members of Congress do their part to support the team and attempt move the ball down the field so we have at least a chance at winning, or will they once again refuse to even play ball, guaranteeing defeat for themselves in 2012 and for all of us in the meantime?