Changing the conversation

John Nichols offers the most considered response to Barack Obama’s job speech on The Nation website, pointing out the president’s attempt to alter the terms of debate.

The rhetoric, he points out, was powerful, even if the plan was only functional in typical half-loaf Obama fashion.

The $253 billion in tax cuts he wants go mainly to working folks. The $194 billion in new spending is aimed at hiring incentives, infrastructure projects and other job-creating and retaining programs that the moment demands and that polls suggest Americans are more than willing to fund.

These might seem like rather large numbers in the current political climate, but they really aren’t. The $450 billion now on the table is only a little more than half the size of the original Obama stimulus, which was probably about half the size of what we needed. So $450 billion is a plus, but we have to face the troubling reality that it’s impact is likely to be small.

But, as Nichols points out, this speech shifts the terms of debate and puts the GOP in the position of defending a cut-our-way-out approach that most Americans understand is pure folly.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet