Budget Fact Check: Creating Jobs & Reinvesting in America's Economy
03/20/2009
Partisan attacks claim that President Obama's budget does not create jobs…
In fact, President Obama’s budget invests in initiatives that will grow the economy by creating jobs, putting money in the pockets of Americans, and improving opportunities for future generations.
The President's budget:
- Continues to make critical investments in the modernization our nation’s infrastructure, including our highways, bridges, waterways, mass transit, and aviation system, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
- Helps small businesses and innovative companies grow by eliminating the capital gains tax on small businesses and making the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent.
- Puts money in the pockets of America’s workers and their families:
- Makes permanent the $800 “Making Work Pay” tax cut for 95 percent of working families, increasing consumer demand and stimulating job creation.
- Expands and extends unemployment insurance benefits for jobless Americans seeking work in this troubled economy, with every dollar in expanded unemployment benefits creating at least $1.63 in economic activity.
- Expands the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit to help millions of families with children.
- Permanently protects 26 million middle-class families from being hit by the alternative minimum tax, which would have increased their taxes substantially.
- Funds weatherization for low-income family homes to save working families an average of $350 per year.
- Improves opportunities for future generations:
- Makes the $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent to make college more affordable.
- Triples the number of graduate fellowships in the sciences to help foster innovation here at home.
- Expands Pell Grants to account for inflation.
- Modernizes the electric grid for the integration and use of greater amounts of renewable energy and increased utilization of innovative efficiency technologies.
The Obama Budget:
- Cuts taxes (for 95 percent of American workers)
- Cuts spending (non-defense discretionary - over 10 years - to its lowest level as a percent of the economy in nearly half a century)
- Grows nothing but jobs
- Cuts the deficit (in half over four years)
- Ends an era of irresponsibility and gimmicks
Creating American Jobs means:
- Making quality health care affordable
- Powering our economy with clean American energy
- Modernizing our education system
We can't afford to wait. Failure to reform and invest produced eight years of the slowest job growth in three quarters of a century.