Jobs Bill = 1 Million Jobs. Tell Congress, Pass It Now!
Jobs Bill = 1 Million Jobs. Tell Congress, Pass It Now!
by Mike Hall
http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/05/26/jobs-bill-1-million-jobs-tell-congress-pass-it-now/
While the U.S. House is still hammering out a timetable for a vote on the Promoting American Jobs, Closing Tax Loopholes and Preventing Outsourcing Act of 2010 (H.R. 4213), lawmakers might move a little faster if they take a look at the latest report on the jobs bill. There are 1 million jobs at stake.
Call 877-442-6801 and tell Congress to pass it now!
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that the bill’s package of aid to states, infrastructure projects, extension of unemployment insurance (UI) and COBRA benefits, creation of summer jobs, loan guarantees for small business and other provisions
will help save or create well over a million critically needed jobs.
The EPI report notes that not only will the UI and COBRA extensions benefit “the nearly 10 million Americans who have lost their jobs and are receiving unemployment compensation while they look for work,” but the safety net spending also will benefit “the economy as a whole by circulating cash into local communities and helping businesses avert further job cuts.”
Each $1 billion of unemployment compensation generates an estimated $1.63 billion to $2.15 billion of additional gross domestic product. If the unemployed did not receive insurance benefits, then their reduced consumption would be a serious drag on the economy, reducing demand for businesses’ goods and services, in turn leading businesses to reduce investments and lay off additional workers.
The jobs bill also will start the process of making Wall Street finally pay to restore the millions of jobs the Big Banks and financial institutions destroyed with their reckless and risky practices. EPI says the bill
closes a host of tax loopholes that have allowed many of the wealthiest Americans to pay a lower income tax rate than the average steel worker, encouraged businesses to move their operations overseas to escape U.S. taxes, and allowed some professionals to forgo paying their share of Medicare and Social Security taxes. These provisions will raise well over $40 billion, helping to pay for the bill’s job creation provisions and to make the tax code much fairer.
Those representatives who criticize government spending on job creation as ineffective or inefficient should read another new report. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds that in the first quarter of this year, the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, created as many as 2.8 million jobs.
In addition, the recovery package lowered the unemployment by as much as 1.5 percent and
increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)
That sure seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars. Click here for the full CBO report.
If you haven’t called your representative to urge him or her to vote in support of the jobs bill, there is still time. Call 877-442-6801 and urge your representative to vote for H.R. 4213 to create and save jobs and make Wall Street pay. Tell your representative a vote against the bill is a vote against jobs.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Click on the AFL-CIO Blog link to find several important embedded links in this article like the CBO report.