Thread: Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program

Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program

Mon, 06/22/2009 - 17:08 — dlindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing patience with the Obama administration’s and Congress’ economic stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the US workforce, at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of the Obama administration’s signature $780-billion stimulus spending package is under 150,000—a far cry from the 3.5 million that were promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media, suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had, for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration officials, that unemployment figures are a “lagging indicator,â€

Maybe at that point people will start demanding that their taxes be used by the federal government to directly employ people, instead of trusting employers to pass it through to their workers, or that at a minimum, organizations receiving stimulus program funds be barred from laying workers off or cutting their pay.



And why should we want the federal government deciding who holds a job and who doesn't? The latter is much more palatable a solution.

I would suggest that maybe, at some point, people will stop looking at obama as an ordinary politician and begin to see him as what he is.....a radical community organizer.

And as such, he knows precisely how a certain sector will respond to any given situation leading me to believe that employers who received the stimulus funds are reacting in just the way he knew that they would.

Enter Plan B where.....just as we've seen him takeover banks and other corporations......obama the great decides that the situation is being mishandled by employers and therefore, the government must take control to ensure that people keep and have their jobs.

The inevitable result is one in which obama, and only obama, decides who will work, where they work, and how much they will be paid.

So we're already headed down that path, let's not have a situation where Americans decide that federal government should step in and start directly hiring people at businesses receiving federal funds.