Groundhog Day: President Obama Poised to Announce Another “Jobs Plan”

The media is abuzz with “Breaking News” that in early September the President will outline his latest plan for job creation. This latest pronouncement, however, may leave Americans wondering if they are like the Bill Murray character in the movie Groundhog Day: forced to relive speech after speech from the President about jobs, but with no different results. A look back at some prior headlines during the Obama presidency reveals a steady drumbeat of major speeches, plans, summits, and task forces – all supposedly designed to stimulate job growth. But as the chart below reflects, all those efforts have done nothing to stem 30 straight months of unemployment above 8 percent – a level President Obama promised America would never see under his trillion-dollar stimulus plan. In fact, by now, the President predicted under his plan the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent and falling, not stuck above 9 percent for yet another month.

With more than 70 percent of Americans criticizing his handling of the economy, even some of the President’s strongest allies are seeing through his latest efforts to promote the same old failed stimulus policies. The New York Times noted in an editorial this week that the President’s attitude “[W]ould be much more effective if he combined it with strong ideas of his own for how to fix the economy, rather than the thin agenda he is now promoting.” And the former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, admitted what the Administration has already tried is not working: “Not proposing anything bold and not trying to do something to definitively deal with our problems would mean that we’re going to have another year and a half like the last year and a half.”

Past Headlines about the Obama Administration’s Previous “Jobs Plans”