Jobs Bill
With America’s unemployment rate in double digits, the US House on Wednesday narrowly passed a $154 billion jobs bill. The vote was 217 to 212.
The package is not expected to be taken up by the Senate until early next year. But if the legislation is ultimately passed in to law, it may produce funding for worker training in high-growth or emerging industries. It could also provide money for municipalities to hire more police & firefighters, & it could generate a host of other programs designed to place Americans back to work.
Billions would probably go toward highway construction & mass transit. The House legislation calls for $500 million for airport construction & $800 million for Amtrak.
“The jobs bill will generate jobs & help lower the unemployment rate to be less than it would have been without the spending,” says Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst for tax & budget policyowner at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) in Boston.
A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they was not aware of how lots of jobs the legislation would generate. Lawmakers received terrible publicity after the first stimulus package did not produce the number of jobs that it promised. President Obama said the prior legislation would save or generate 4 million jobs over five years.
The total spending in the jobs bill could amount to very 1 percent of US yucky domestic product. But, the total is considerably less than the $780 billion stimulus bill passed earlier this year.
“We didn’t receive a lot of bang for the buck out of that package,” says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York. “I’m not sure this is any better.”
Lowering the unemployment rate could be a hard slog. On Wednesday, in testimony before the Senate Democratic Policyowner Committee, Martin Neil Baily, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned that even if the economy adds 200,000 jobs a month, it will take five years to lower the unemployment rate to 5 percent.
“If the aim is to generate jobs with this jobs bill, then we’ll invest in buses & rail than highways,” a source says. According to him, every $1 billion spent on public transportation makes 16,419 job months (jobs in a month) compared with 8,781 for highways.
As the new legislation was up for consideration in the House, some groups continued to argue over how to get the most jobs out of government money. In an analysis of the first stimulus, Clever Growth The united states, the US PIRG, & the Center for Neighborhood Technology claimed that spending on public transportation produced five times as lots of jobs as that for highway construction.
But the construction industry argues it needs to get workers out on “shovel ready” projects. The unemployment rate for the construction industry was 19.4 percent in November. States have identified 9,500 road, bridge, & transit projects that are “ready to go,” according to the lobbying group AASHTO, which represents highway interests.
Some mass-transit advocates argue that a massive investment in rail could help use out-of-work auto workers. “It takes the same skill set to build an 80-foot passenger rail automobile as it does to build an automobile,” says John Robert Smith, president of Reconnecting The united states, which is based in Washington conducts research on transit-oriented development.
“It’s vital if they receive a jobs bill made in order to get people in to new careers. & they must have some capacity to make sure they have the skills to do the new jobs,” says Kermit Kaleba, a senior policyowner analyst at the Workforce Alliance in Washington, which advocates training programs.
Prior to this year, government spending on job training had been going down. But the House version of the legislation reverses that trend, providing $1.25 billion is for training programs. This would supplement the $3 billion to $4 billion that was in the first stimulus package.
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