Obama unveils new job-creating plan
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U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday a new job-creating initiative on using the unspent money under a financial system bailout package to tackle the country's double-digit unemployment.
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U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech on the economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, December 8, 2009. [Xinhua/AFP Photo] |
Obama said at Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, that the proposals are set "to accelerate job growth and lay the foundation for robust economic growth."
Obama addressed three main areas: helping small businesses add staff and grow; updating transportation infrastructure; and making homes energy-efficient.
He said that he wants to see in the coming weeks and months, more Americans in the workplace and fewer on unemployment, which now stands at 10 percent.
Obama repeated that thanks to his administration's effort, the U.S. economy avoided successfully a second Great Depression. The overall economy changed from contraction to expansion.
"But our work is far from done. For even though we have reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who have been swept up in the flood," he said.
The money which supports the new job-creating plan will come from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The 700-billion-U.S. -dollar package, which was approved by the Congress in October 2008 to bail out the melting-down financial institutions, had turned out to be more than 200 billion dollars cheaper than expected, providing additional resources for job creation and for deficit reduction.
Obama said that "the assistance to banks, once thought to cost the taxpayers untold billions, is on track to actually reap billions in profit for the taxpaying public."
"This gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster than we thought possible and to shift funds that would have gone to help the banks on Wall Street to help create jobs on Main Street," Obama said.
Obama said that the new measures are part of the overall policy designed to not just create jobs in the short run but also shift America away from consumption-driven growth to a focus on enhancing the competitiveness of America's businesses, encouraging investment, and promoting exports.
