In this entry I would like to take a look at Barack Obama's 5 point plan to turn the economy around that I saw while watching college football today. Lets take a look at each point and see what there is to it. Below will find a copy of the bullet points I found posted on the Obama Facebook page.
Point 1: President Obama is going to create 1 million new manufacturing jobs by 2016. Where are those jobs going to come from? I recently saw a poll where 55% of business owners stated that they would not start their business in today's economy and political climate. One thing that the Obama administration (and the last several presidents prior) has been very good at, is not being clear on what direction their policies and regulations are headed. Businesses rely on forecasts and things like 5 year plans to justify expansion, hiring etc With all of the new regulations that have been released, it has been next to impossible to plan for them. Taxes are the same way. With the way that Congress has continued with short term extensions of the Bush Tax cuts, how is anyone supposed to be able to plan for the future? Another good question is, what are these new manufacturing jobs going to manufacture? Our economy has already been moving away from a manufacturing base for over 20 years now. it started with the Reagan administration beginning talks on what became NAFTA that was finally signed into place by President Clinton. The trend has only picked up steam from there.
Point 2: Train 2 million workers by investing in community college. This is great on paper, but without job creation you just have 2 million more people with degrees and college debt that they will struggle to pay for.
Point 3: Give Tax Breaks to companies that invest in America. What happened to Wall Street and the Rich paying their fair share. Isn't this just a continuation of the horribly complex and overly complicated tax code? There must be a better way.
Point 4: Double American Exports. America's best and most valuable resource to the rest of the world is our farm lands. We provide food to most many countries already that have very poor agricultural bases. Hasn't food become expensive enough domestically as it is? As far as other exports, most of the raw materials for things like computers, cars, or any other technology is already made overseas. Unless we bring this back in house (which will cause an increase of the cost of that product because the overhead for our businesses due to the number of regulations, cost of healthcare, and tax code make us less competitive in the global market) then we would be important the raw materials, building the final product, then exporting it back out to to rest of the world? Doesn't that seem backwards?
Point 5: Cut oil imports in half by 2020 and invest in clean energy. I believe the end goal of the administration here is to continue to increase the gas mileage requirements of new vehicles to reduce consumption. I hope this also includes increased domestic production of oil. The downside to this is that a large amount of the oil available domestically is much more expensive to extract and refine than the oil we import. Won't the next result here be increase prices for everyone at the pump? Clean energy is a great goal, but most will agree that there won't be a clean alternative that will be viable and competitive to oil by 2020.
Overall I feel that Obama's plan is full of grand ideas, without the ideas behind them to actually put them into reality. This is just like the Hope and Change platform that he ran on in 2008. It makes for a great speech, but there is little in the way of content and concrete ideas behind it.
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