Obama announces plan for small businesses

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President Barack Obama revealed a plan Tuesday to spur the economy by helping small businesses, investing in America’s infrastructure and creating green jobs.

Obama explained his proposals, which mostly were extensions of current stimulus programs, during a morning speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

“These are areas in which we can put Americans to work, while putting our nation on a sturdier economic footing,” Obama said. “That foundation for sustained economic growth – that must be our continuing focus and our ultimate goal.”

Obama said he wants to extend the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to spend more on road, bridge and water improvements. He said he also wants to give small businesses tax breaks for new hires and create consumer incentives for families to make their homes energy-efficient.

“Even though we’ve reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who’ve been swept up in the flood,” Obama said during his speech. “It speaks to an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term while laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth.”

Although Obama did not cite the cost of his proposals, he said there is money left in the federal budget because the financial system bailout cost less than expected. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, set aside $700 billion to help the financial system following last year’s financial crisis, and there is about $200 billion left over.

With an unemployment rate of 14.3 percent in Michigan, Gov. Jennifer Granholm supports Obama’s proposals, the governor’s spokeswoman Megan Brown said.

Granholm was in Washington, D.C., last week to advocate for similar ideas with an emphasis on policy changes and job creation in Michigan, Brown said.

“(The ideas the president proposed) were certainly things the governor was asking for,” Brown said. “The governor is encouraged by his speech today where he addressed job creation and states.”

Brown said small business taxes and incentives, clean energy and state and local government assistance were ideas Granholm pushed.

Stimulus programs have been fairly successful thus far and this proposal should help the employment outlook for graduates, MSU economics professor Charles Ballard said.

“The various stimulative programs are trying to inject money into the economic system and they have been somewhat successful,” Ballard said. “That will, in turn, help all graduates and those who are unemployed.”

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