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Opinions/Editorials Title: Obama Not Cutting It On The Economy Much like Wednesday was once Prince Spaghetti Day, Tuesday is fast becoming political juggling day for the Obama administration. In his Afghanistan speech last week, the president struggled to keep his dueling objectives (surging but not staying) in the air without crashing into each other. In Tuesday's speech re-setting his economic policy, the president similarly strained to sate the left's demands for more spending on job creation to deal with the unnerving unemployment numbers and the center's demands for more fiscal restraint to deal with the exploding debt. By typical Washington standards, the economic balancing act was executed more deftly. Unlike the confusing Afghanistan policy announcement, Obama's new jobs plan offered a politically appealing, easy-to-understand solution to the budgetary box we're now in: Tap the TARP. We can have our cake and spend it too, the president and his staff explainers suggested, by using leftover or returned bank bailout money to bail out the middle class with a series of targeted, short-term incentives to increase hiring. Deficit neutral, populist popular--what's not to like? Article Controls Emailemail imageprint imagereprint imagenewsletter imagecomments imageshare imagedel.icio.us imageDigg It! imageyahoo imageFacebook imageTwitter imageReddit imagerss Yahoo! Buzz Well, clever and simple is not the same as hope and change. It's certainly not the fundamental break from politics as usual and tired conventional thinking that--forget about Obama's pre-crash campaign promises--the times absolutely demand now. Indeed, we're confronting an unprecedented combination of grave economic challenges that, while not as immediate as the financial collapse we avoided last fall, may be more consequential. Yet with his difference-splitting speech today, the president seemed to be signing a political DNR statement, signaling that he is not prepared to take any more heroic measures--or even out-of-the-box ones--to save our prosperity. That's not to say Team Obama is giving up or doing nothing. The modest job-creation proposals the administration unveiled Tuesday individually have their merits, and they seem much more mission-focused than the mish-mashed stimulus bill that Congressional Democrats constructed. But no one is going to confuse the new programs separately or collectively with the scope and innovation of the experiments Franklin Roosevelt pursued the last time we had an employment forecast this grim. Moreover, not even the administration will argue that this package is up to the task of making a noticeable dent in the unemployment rate, let alone rebuilding our decimated job base. That's because the new jobs plan was not designed to be a policy game-changer but a political stopgap, to tide the public over and buy the White House time for the second half of the stimulus plan to kick in. They are betting the national farm--soybeans to servers--that the old stimulus combined with the new "stimulus lite" will provide enough demand to spur enough new hiring to calm the country. That might be a sensible strategy--if the original stimulus bill had actually been targeted at private sector job growth rather than strengthening public safety nets, protecting government jobs and paying off Democratic constituencies. But knowing the stimulus bill's limitations--and more import the limited impact it has had to date--the White House is bordering on Bushian in stubbornly sticking with this approach as the centerpiece of his recovery agenda. Even if you grant that it was successful in slowing the hemorrhaging of jobs, as many economists contend, it is hard to imagine that quartering down on the current policy will succeed in spurring sustained job creation and solving the crisis of confidence the Great Recession has engendered.
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