(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on The Journal of Commerce website on December 7, 2009.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama plans to propose a new set of job-stimulating efforts on Dec. 8, and he told a Pennsylvania audience that his Thursday jobs summit discussed making “additional investments in America’s roads and bridges and railways and ports.”
Obama said today’s employment report for November, which saw the jobless rate come down to 10 percent from 10.2 percent in October and the number of payroll job losses down to just 11,000, was the best monthly performance since 2007.
But he said “we’ve got a lot more work to do before we can celebrate, because even though our economy is now growing again a lot of companies are still hesitant to hire.”
Obama, speaking in Allentown, Pa., said the jobs conference at the White House considered various ways to stimulate hiring while rebuilding old infrastructure including roads and ports, modernizing the energy grid and developing clean energy systems. “We’ve got to have an infrastructure plan,” he said.
The president also said that “on Tuesday, I’m going to speak in greater detail about the ideas I’ll be sending to Congress to help jumpstart private sector hiring and get Americans back to work.”
He said Gov. Ed Rendell has been a champion of “rebuilding the critical infrastructure of our economy.” Together they have been working on “the idea of an infrastructure bank,” Obama said.
That institution, he said, could prioritize projects for national needs, “so that instead of us just every six years having Congress vote to figure out what our infrastructure is — and there’s no real planning to it — that you had a system where we could actually leverage private sector dollars into making investments alongside the public sector.”
The six year process refers to the current system of multi-year surface transportation spending programs, which usually are delayed several times when they are due to expire before lawmakers agree on the next set of priorities and how to pay for them.