President-elect Barack Obama unveiled a major portion of his economic agenda on Saturday, pledging a massive investment in infrastructure across the United States as a way of stimulating economic growth. He also upped his guarantee of job creation to a whopping 2.5 million in the next two years - an enormous challenge by anyone's count. Among the key points of his plan:
--> rebuilding and improving roads and bridges
--> a massive campaign/investment to make public buildings more energy efficient
--> modernizing and upgrading school buildings - including new computers
--> strengthening our broadband investment to improve internet access
--> modernizing the healthcare system by featuring electronic medical records
I guess he's certainly embracing the mantle of "tax and spend," which will no doubt be thrown against him, and every successive liberal who runs for office, by the Republican Party. Thankfully, it's a much better plan than "cut taxes but spend anyway."
Unfortunately, the "tax" portion of the plan might not be as quick in coming as we'd like it to be. First, aides to the President-elect had recently suggested that Obama's pledge to repeal the outrageous Bush tax cuts for the wealthy may be indefinitely delayed, as a tax hike on anyone in this economic climate could be a recipe for further instability. Now, it appears that the proposal to institute a windfall profits tax on oil companies may be shelved as well. The justification seems to be that the price of oil has dropped so much that these companies are no longer making those ridiculous profits.
We'll see how this plays out, but we might lay these down as the first (of what will hopefully be few) broken promises of the new administration.
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