President’s new initiatives could boost employment by more than one million, on top of impact from extensions of temporary provisions
Still waiting for details, but the outline of the President’s Jobs plan is beginning to take shape:
Obama jobs plan could cost $300 billion, include tax cuts, new spending – The Washington Post
[…] According to sources with knowledge of White House deliberations, Obama’s plan may consist of spending on programs to extend aid to state and local governments to retain teachers and rehabilitate school buildings, as well as put construction crews to work retrofitting commercial buildings to make them more environmentally friendly.
There will also be a series of tax cuts, including an extension of a payroll tax cut enacted in January that has put an average of $1,000 into people’s paychecks, and tax incentives for companies that hire unemployed workers. The White House also will propose new aid for the long-term unemployed.
Mortgage relief for struggling homeowners, through a refinancing option that could pump billions of dollars into the economy, is also being considered, according to administration officials and others familiar with the deliberations.
The total package is likely to cost more than $200 billion, and an Associated Press report Wednesday put the price tag at $300 billion. White House aides declined to confirm that number.
Note that the payroll tax holiday and the Extended Unemployment Insurance continuation would cost around $160 billion. So there may be $100 bill + of new stuff. It looks like the overall job impact would be in the ballpark of 2.5 and 3 million jobs, with 1 – 1.4 million from the new stuff and 1.6 million from continuing the two temporary pieces.
(I’m assuming that the overall package contains between somewhere between $100 and $150 billion in new initiatives, and that these are weighted heavily towards high bang-for-the-buck items like infrastructure spending.)
We’ll have more analysis as the details emerge.
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