A: It includes Obama’s signature “Making Work Pay” tax credit for 95 percent of workers, though negotiators agreed to trim the credit to $400 a year instead of $500 — or $800 for married couples, cut from Obama’s original proposal of $1,000. It would begin showing up in most workers’ paychecks in June as an extra $13 a week in take-home pay, falling to about $8 a week next January.
There is also a $70 billion, one-year fix for the alternative minimum tax. The fix would save some 20 million mainly upper-middle-income taxpayers about $2,000 in taxes for 2009.
Q: How will infrastructure spending affect jobs?
A: The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that every $1 billion the federal government spends on infrastructure projects translates to 35,000 jobs. Collins put the total infrastructure spending — including highways, mass transit, environmental cleanups and broadband facilities — at $150 billion. Do the math and that translates into more than 5 million jobs, based on the highway administration’s assumptions.
All of this, and taxpayers will just get $13 a week? Falling to $8 a week? How is that going to stimulate anything? To be patriotic we must not use this windfall to pay down our debts but spend it so as to give a mighty jolt to our economy. Let’s see, doing the math as the article recommends, this means we will have $1.85 per day. What should we spend this on to get our economy going again? A newspaper? That will help the struggling news industry. Chewing gum? That will help the struggling chewing gum industry.
It’s fascinating to learn a $1 billion will give create 35,000 jobs? Is that all? I did the math, as recommended, multiplying 150 and 35000 and the numbers do come up to 5,250,000. But then I did the division and it comes to $28,571 per job. Again, I thought, is that all? The stimulus plan will create a huge hiring boom in low-paid construction workers. Are there enough of them? Will people laid off of high-paying industrial, service, and executive jobs go out and pick up a shovel? And if they did, would they know how to use it?
To build roads and bridges, a good part of that money has to go for concrete, steel, equipment, and engineering. That will boost employment in those sectors, but the higher wages will mean fewer jobs than calculated. More to the point, the massive raw material costs can’t all be counted as wages for “new jobs.”
I just don’t see how all of this will do much to help the economy. Read through the Q&A and answer the question, what will this mean for me?
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