WTF? Correct me if I am wrong, but the President made a major speech on inequality last year, right?
Then what in the h*ll is this all about?
White House offers 'grand bargain' on tax cuts and infrastructure
Sun Jan 5, 2014 10:10 AM EST
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By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News
Gene Sperling, the director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, said Sunday that Obama is offering congressional Republicans “a grand bargain on jobs. He has said he would be willing to do corporate tax reform that lowers rates to 28 percent, simplifies taxes for small businesses, but do it together with a major infrastructure investment.”
In his budget proposal last year, Obama called for $50 billion in additional short-term federal spending on infrastructure projects such as bridges, highways, and mass transit systems, as well as creation of a National Infrastructure Bank to make loans to such projects.
“The economy is improving” and “we’ve had a lot of momentum,” Sperling said on NBC’s Meet the Press, but there are still “people who are desperately looking for work.” He said, “We have to admit – and we do admit -- that the worst legacy of this great recession is the crisis of long-term unemployment.”
I had heard that Dems were going to use unemployment in 2014 as a way to avoid doing something about inequality.
Yes, the President should be calling for Congress to pass a massive direct hire jobs program, and rebuiling/transforming infrastructure should be part of that. In addition, we should be following the advice of the British posted by LL here today:
Mon Jan 06, 2014 at 12:52 PM MST
Britain's special representative for climate change offers a dire warning
King recommends that Britain will need to spend up to a £1 billion (roughly $1.6 billion dollars) a year by 2020, to mitigate the damage from climate change and extreme weather. Of course, the overall damage from climate change will overwhelm such numbers. The least worst answer, after so many years of reckless irresponsibility by the world's political and economic "leaders," would be a crisis agenda that starts not with mitigating the damage, but with drastically reducing the causes, and making those responsible pay. Because on every level, the costs will be greater the longer we fail to act.
by Laurence LewisUnfollow
If tiny Britain needs to spend that much then we will need to spend far greater, and pronto.
Cutting taxes for the rich does not seem the way to go. Clawing back the tax losses of the past 30 years will not be helped by more cuts.