Job Creation, U.s. Economy | featured news

Aiming to show he's still focused on creating jobs, President Barack Obama is beginning a series of quick trips around the country to resurrect ideas from his State of the Union address that became overshadowed by the intense debates over gun control, immigration and automatic spending cuts.

"Here's the dilemma: we do have a long-term debt problem, but that doesn't mean that austerity now is the right response," Clinton said, adding that Republicans only support austerity measures "when Democrats are president." An affirmative plan on how to spark job creation and growth is a more powerful argument to the public than the GOP's advocacy for spending cuts and downsizing government, he contended.

Actually, it’s not the economy. At least not this week. A presidential campaign that Republicans wanted to be focused relentlessly on President Obama’s job-creation record seems to be about almost everything else at the moment. In part that’s the result of a monthslong effort by the Obama campaign to shift attention to Mitt Romney’s wealth and business record.

In a sense, what’s really interesting about the Romney and Obama plans is that they don’t conflict with one another. Obama has a set of ideas for boosting job creation now. Romney has a set of ideas for long-term economic growth. You could implement all of Obama’s 41 bullet points and all of Romney’s 59 bullet points simultaneously. There’s nothing about increasing infrastructure investment that keeps you from cutting corporate taxes, for instance.

Third straight month of weak hiring shows economy is struggling three years after recession ended. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.2 percent, the Labor Department said Friday. Click to Continue »

President Obama signed a jobs bill into law on Thursday, but declared that the measure “is by no means enough.”