Washington’s New Four-Letter Word - Gone is the word “debt.” That’s so last week. Now the word is “JOBS” -
There’s a new four-letter buzzword in Washington, and everyone wants a piece of it.
Gone is the word “debt.” That’s so last week. Now the word is “jobs.”
Jobs—or the recent lack of them—have been President Barack Obama’s political Achilles, with unemployment hovering over 9 percent. He plans to spend the next few weeks describing how to create them. Republicans, meanwhile, plan to use jobs as a political shield to try to block everything from new taxes to environmental regulations.
The reason is simple: There aren’t enough jobs in the economy to support the recovery, leaving investors and workers fearful of a double-dip recession.
The Labor Department released the latest round of employment statistics on Friday, and Wall Street got a tiny dose of good news with 117,000 jobs added to the private sector in July. But the unemployment rate stubbornly stayed above 9 percent, leaving both political parties to scramble for a new message now that the debt crisis is resolved.
Obama is making the rounds to convey the message that’s he’s on it. On Friday, it was boosting veteran jobs at Washington’s Navy Yard where he lamented that unemployment was “still too high.” Next Tuesday it’ll be green jobs, touting his mileage standards for saving shipping companies big money—and in effect, jobs. And the week after, the president will embark on a campaign-style bus trip through the Midwest, billed as a “listening tour” for unemployed Americans.
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