The Myth of Job Creators and Small Business

After listening to this brief interview on NPR, I learned a little about the potential impact of the President's proposed job's plan, but I learned something even more interesting about how small businesses impact the economy.

Small businesses account for 90% of the nation's 6 million companies with paid employees, but they only account for about 20% of our nation's employed citizens. What this means to me is that all the noise we hear from politicians about the importance of supporting small business people is more political hype and rhetoric than it is effective economic policy. That's news to me.

Disagree? Listen to the interview and let me know.

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.

Michele Bachmann Predicts Failure, Offers Nothing

Republican Presidential hopeful (and the most embarrassing thing to come out of Minnesota since Sen. Larry Craig's restroom toe-tapping incident) Michele Bachmann has already started spouting her typical worthless partisan rhetoric in response to the President's jobs plan. As expected, her empty words provide no factual back up for her statements and she offers absolutely ZERO alternative ideas of her own. She is poison and she is simply bad for us all.

Full Text of the President's Speech

Kevin Lamarque  /  Reuters

I've just finished reading the full text of President Obama's jobs speech, and if you missed the address, I would urge you to do the same. Yes, it's long, but educating ourselves takes effort, and this speech contains important details about our economy, something we all say we care about a great deal.

I have to say, President Obama has laid it all out for Congress. He has provided a wealth of specific job creation ideas and he has enumerated specific ways of paying for everything he proposed.

He also very openly acknowledged that there are some ideas his fellow Democrats won't appreciate (like adjustments to Medicare and Medicaid programs) and some ideas Republicans will balk at (like raising tax rates on the very top tier of wealthy Americans). Who gives a damn? If Congress wants to avoid wholesale incumbent replacement in the 2012 election, then they better suck it up, move past the politics and ideology, and take meaningful action.

The White House has gathered all these proposals for boosting our economy WITHOUT increasing our debt into a program called the American Jobs Act. It's now up to Congress to pass this legislation, in whole or in part, and if they can't do that, then they better damn well enact some legislation of their own that will move us forward as a nation.