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Obama pressured by US unemployment

27 September 2011 19:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Pressure on President Obama to improve the US employment situation has increased, but his "effective by" deadline may have already passed, APA reports quoting Press TV.

In recent weeks, the White House has focused more on the issue of jobs as the Americans say they are tired of discussing government debt and their leaders need to focus on employment.

President Obama released a job plan more than two weeks ago and is encouraging the Americans to embrace the bill - he says it will get an estimated nearly two million people back to work.

â€œHe is actually the strongest political figure in the country, he is doing what a leader should do, which is to lay out where the country needs to go, defining how we need to get there, thatâ€™s the kind of president we need right now,â€ political analyst, Simon Rosenberg said referring to President Obama.

But, according to the economists, the presidentâ€™s plan may be a few months short of being effective by next yearâ€™s presidential elections.

The issue of US unemployment remains persistent as 14 million Americans are unemployed and more than 25 million unable to find full-time work.

Obama says his American Jobs Act would lower unemployment by a single percentage point by next year, to just over 8 percent.

Even if the Presidentâ€™s projections were correct, it still wouldnâ€™t get a lot of Americans back on the job.

â€œThere is a real difference between temporary spending to generate jobs when you have 9.1 percent unemployment versus long-term structural deposits, long-term structural deposits actually are a problem,â€ US policy analyst Heidi Shierholz commented on the issue.

Furthermore, President Obama has to sell his bill to a divided Congress. The president wants to permanently increase taxes on the nationâ€™s wealthiest individuals and corporations to partly fund the USD 447 billion jobs bill.

The Republicans are convinced, however, that any tax increase would discourage job creation and push the fragile US economy in the wrong direction.