Where the Obama job plan falls short

Fareed Zakaria critiques the Obama 'job' bill and then suggests his own solution. He begins with this reasoning:

President Obama’s jobs bill is better than doing nothing in the face of a national crisis, but it won’t have much impact on unemployment. Many of the measures are short-term tax breaks and benefits that are unlikely to affect demand for products and services — business’s fundamental problem — and so won’t boost hiring.

Where Obama’s jobs bill falls short - The Washington Post
Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:16:31 UTC

If it is a jobs bill that will not create jobs, how is it adding $477 billion of debt better than nothing?

If adding jobs is the goal, decrease the price of labor. The government has been increasing liability and taxes on labor, along with risk exposure, for decades. Just the same as it has for land, real estate and externality liability, while drastically slowing down all business development in a warren of regulation and involvement at every level.

Now we have an infrastructure bill. Was not that the way the first stimulus was touted? I guess this time we are led to believe that the administration really, really means it, and its execution will be intelligent, timely and focused on truly decrepit infrastructure. That requires a large leap of faith, since governments have been entrusted with that infrastructure in the first place.