PRESIDENT BARACK Obama returned to the issue that most concerns Americans yesterday: employment and the economy.
Mr Obama played the ecology card in a statement to journalists at the White House, trumpeting his plan to award $2.3 billion (€1.6 billion) in tax credits to “clean-tech” manufacturing projects and predicting the plan would create 17,000 new jobs, with tens of thousands more jobs possible as spin-offs.
This is not enough to compensate for the jobs still being lost. Experts say the US economy would have to create 100,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with new entrants to the jobs market. The labour department’s report on job statistics for December 2009 showed that 85,000 jobs were lost last month, maintaining the unemployment level at 10 per cent.
“The job numbers released this morning are a reminder that the road to recovery is never straight,” Mr Obama said. He has often warned that job creation will lag behind the recovery. “The overall trend is still pointing in the right direction,” he added. His administration would “continue to explore every avenue”.
The clean energy manufacturing initiative was one of the most important elements of the Recovery Act, because “building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future . . . how we will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and combat the threat of climate change”.
The US president said his country is being outpaced by nations such as China, Japan and Germany in such clean technologies as solar panels and battery-powered cars.
“I welcome and wish to see real competition around the world to develop new energy technologies. I don’t want America to lose that competition. I don’t want that technology to be invented abroad. I want America to be the leader.”
Mr Obama said his initiative was “good for middle-class families, good for our security and good for the planet . . . If we can gain the lead in clean energy worldwide, then we will forge a future where a better life is possible in our country over the long run.”
Christina Romer, Mr Obama’s chief economic adviser, said yesterday’s labour department statistics represented “a setback from November”, when 4,000 jobs were created – the first increase since the recession started two years ago. The figures were nonetheless “consistent with the gradual labour market stabilisation we have been seeing over the last several months”.
Ms Romer said the December job losses were “put in perspective” when one considered quarterly figures: average monthly job losses of 691,000 in the first quarter of 2009; 428,000 in the second quarter; 199,000 in the third quarter; and 69,000 in the fourth quarter.
The labour secretary, Hilda Solis, also sought to relativise the December figures. While it “wasn’t the best report”, she said, “last year at this time we were losing over 700,000 jobs a month. The Recovery Act continues to help.”
Republicans seized on the December job losses to criticise the president. “For close to a full year the American people have been forced to watch and in many cases bear the burden of our ever-increasing national unemployment rate, which unfortunately remained in the double digits throughout the month of December,” Republican national committee chairman Michael Steele said yesterday.
“It’s time for President Obama to . . . finally do what he should have been doing over the past year – put his full and undivided attention on fixing our economy.”
The House Republican leader John Boehner said “employers and workers are stuck in the muck of higher taxes, job-killing policies and wasteful Washington spending”.
“A jobless recovery is a far cry from what the American people were promised last winter, when Washington Democrats jammed through a trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ that they said would create jobs ‘immediately’,” Mr Boehner said.
“Instead, roughly three million Americans have lost their jobs since then . . . Instead of wildly pivoting from one issue to the next, the Obama administration needs to listen to American families asking ‘Where are the jobs?’”