President Barack Obama is promoting help for highways and small businesses, bridges and energy-efficient homes in a broad pitch to get Americans back to work and roll back the double-digit unemployment that’s approaching a quarter-century high, an administration official said today.
In a speech prepared for delivery today, Obama plans to talk about what he wants to see in the coming weeks and months — chiefly, more Americans in the workplace and fewer on unemployment, which now stands at 10 percent.
Obama planned to address three main areas: helping small businesses add staff and grow; updating transportation infrastructure; and making homes energy-efficient, according to an administration official who discussed the speech on the condition of anonymity to preview an unreleased text.
The official said Obama’s remarks would not represent the sum of the president’s plan, but rather an outline for the way forward. It was a similar line other White House officials used to preview the remarks.
“We’ve got quite some way to go,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters on Monday. “The president is not going to unveil the silver bullet idea. … If there was one idea to do this, I assume it would have been done sometime in the intervening 22 months” since the recession began.
The White House is considering using a suddenly available pot of money left over from the government’s bank bailout to help create jobs. Officials initially seemed cool to the idea of trying to redirect that money to jobs-related programs but have changed their tone after a government report last week showed a slightly lower unemployment rate. (AP)
