Regardless of your political inclinations, Obama’s speech last night shows a distinct care for issues predominantly affecting men.
The American Jobs Act provides a “Returning Heroes” tax credit of between $5,000 and $9,600 to encourage businesses to hire returning veterans. In addition, it will prevent many layoffs among police officers and firefighters. For both biological and social reasons, men are most likely to take dangerous jobs that involve protecting people– whether in the military or at home. The least we can do is help insure that they can remain employed.
Obama also intends to reform unemployment insurance. The American Jobs Act will extend unemployment benefits, provide tax credits to businesses that hire long-term unemployed people, make discriminating against the unemployed illegal, and promote state programs to help the long-term unemployed, such as reemployment assistance and training, “Bridge to Work” programs that allow them to collect unemployment insurance while in training or doing temporary work and start-up assistance.
As we know, unemployment and subsequent loss of self-worth from work, “success object” status and the ability to provide for their families hits men extremely hard; for some, it may result in depression or even suicide. This is compounded, because men are still more likely to be unemployed than women: 9.6% of men over the age of sixteen are unemployed, as compared to 8.5% of women.
However, what is perhaps the most male-oriented aspect of Obama’s jobs bill is his support for unemployed construction workers. Construction workers, a predominantly male profession, are one of the hardest-hit professions, with an astonishing 13.2% unemployment rate (down from 16.3% last year). The bursting of the housing bubble led to a drought of new construction, which left hundreds of thousands of construction workers without even the possibility of a job.
Obama intends on expanding and improving our nation’s infrastructure. 35,000 public schools are up to renovation; $50 billion will be spent on highways, transit, rail and aviation; $15 billion will be invested in hiring construction workers to rehabilitate vacant and foreclosed-on homes; $10 billion will create a National Infrastructure Bank to encourage future infrastructure projects. These programs could put hundreds of thousands of construction workers to work.
Of course, I have no doubt that our blog contains a diversity of opinions about the American Jobs Act. If you’re American, you can contact your congresspeople about the American Jobs Act here (House) and here (Senate).
About ozyfrantz
I don’t really have an opinion on Obama’s speech as a masculist, but I do have one as a Democrat:
Tax breaks to hire veterans? Obama. you Magnificent Bastard!
I’m just glad the policy exists, and not as a “gotcha” aimed at conservatives. Same for the rest of these policies if they function in practice. Many of the careers listed are ones that the men of my family have had to take (my grandfather was both a vet (of WW2) and a construction worker) and my father also did construction before becoming a field surveyor. I myself have considered the army and police work (and assuming certain other oportunities do not work out I still might).
“Obama intends on expanding and improving our nation’s infrastructure. 35,000 public schools are up to renovation; $50 billion will be spent on highways, transit, rail and aviation; $15 billion will be invested in hiring construction workers to rehabilitate vacant and foreclosed-on homes; $10 billion will create a National Infrastructure Bank to encourage future infrastructure projects. These programs could put hundreds of thousands of construction workers to work.”
Should’ve done this in 2010, but hey, better late than never. Perhaps I’m going slightly off-topic, but I’ve always felt that Infrastructure spending is good poltics. It’s something that the strong majority of Americans think the government should be doing and when people start complaining about the deficit, point out that it’s something that would have been done in the long run anyway, so why not spend the money now, when we’re recovering from a recession, provide jobs and then save later?
I’ve contacted my congressman and let him know that I want him to back this bill 100%. I particularly like the bit about ending hiring discrimination against the unemployed; I know from experience that that feels like being formally and officially called a failure, and “failure” is a term that seems to hit men especially hard.
[Self-edited for being too crabbily partisan; don't want to derail.]
Yeah, and he intends to pay for all this by messing with social security and Medicaid. Heaven forbid he cut military spending or actually tax the rich or something. i can support the infrastructure stuff, but not the way he intends to pay for it. He’s also going to spend about 20 billion to keep teachers employed, if he gets his way. This is all really band-aid stuff. The country really has to deal with:
A. World- wide economic instability that threatens Global Depression. It’s probably only a matter of time till another and much larger European country defaults on its debt. We desparately need some debt forgiveness.
B. Outsourcing. No Democrat or Republican in the past 30 years has dealt squarely with that, indeed they’ve helped it along.
@Clarence: Actually, Obama has stated that part of the plan is closing corporate loopholes and taxing the rich. That was one of the major points of his speech. So… yeah.
I can get behind most of it 100%, most especially the provisions to help out veterans, but as Clarence says, I’m not entirely sure about the whole funding issue.
And considering how byzantine and fruitless publicly owned and managed construction projects can be in the US… well, I’m glad construction workers and firms will have some new opportunities, but I have my doubts as to the quality and timeliness of the results in terms of infrastructure.
I do plan on writing to my reps and senators to ask them to support it.
@Clarence: I don’t believe he’s announced yet how he’s going to pay for this. So you’re kind of strawmanning him.
Besides that, I would contact my congresswoman but she’s KINDA the most liberal liberal in the entire House. So I don’t think I need to.
Reasons #9546 why my girlfriend is super cool: she doesn’t judge me for being unemployed. She likes me for me and isn’t worried about how I will “take care” of her. She said that if we got married, she wouldn’t mind making more than me. She’s even be cool be with me being a stay-at-home dad!
Noah:
Could you point me to anything specific?
I think I’ve been following Obama probably quite a bit closer than anyone here except maybe Ampersand. He has never stood up for a tax and I doubt he ever will. I saw a whole summary of the speech last night with all the bullet points, and I don’t recall a single thing about taxing the rich. Seems from what I’m reading he’s planning on taking his cues on how to pay from it from the so-called “catfood” commission.
Here’s the link to the White House Fact Sheet:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/08/fact-sheet-american-jobs-act
Nothing in here at all about taxing the wealthy, or indeed, taxes at all. He’s going to go with that commission and “work with them” to pay for it. People closely following the commission report that some of their biggest ideas involve cuts to medicaid and raising the retirement age for SS. I believe the people I read because they’ve almost a 100 percent correct record in predicting Obama’s fiscal moves the past 2 years.
I see the fact sheet Clarence put up but is there by chance a recording of him giving his speech?
Danny, you can view the entire speech here on the White House’s web site.
I liked the speech okay, didn’t listen to the whole thing but skimmed a transcript of it.
I have to agree with Clarence (and not just because he gave me a compliment!). Although Obama has proposed various measures to increase revenue, I can’t recall him ever fighting for one, with the exception of the revenues included as part of the Affordable Care Act. And in the long run, unless we’re willing to make enormous cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, taxes have to go up a lot more than Obama has proposed — nothing he’s proposed is anywhere near large enough.
I worry that we’re (we Americans, I mean, not just this blog) are paying too much attention to what Obama does, when the primary decision-maker on tax rates and social welfare spending is Congress.
The basic problem is that Republicans have the ability to block any bill, and they benefit politically from the economy being in bad shape. So it’s now nearly impossible to pass anything that would do the economy real good, especially for the men the original post here focuses on. Republicans don’t have any incentive to want anything that would make the economy better to pass (at least, not until there’s a Republican in the White House).
So can a speech like this make a real difference by putting pressure on Republicans to allow another stimulus measure to pass? I honestly don’t know. I hope so, but it seems unlikely.
Amp:
Republicans don’t have any incentive to want anything that would make the economy better to pass (at least, not until there’s a Republican in the White House).
A real ugly stalemate.
I have to throw my hat in with Amp and Clarence on this one. With a few Republican debates already past the only thing they are concerned with is getting a Republican in the White House in 2012. As Amp says Congress (Rep. dominated right now) can block any effort to help the economy (that doesn’t come from them of course) and people will just go on thinking its the president’s fault that we are such bad shape. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if in the event a Rep. won the White House next year (and what a birthday present that will be for me) they turn around and propose some of the very things Obama is trying to propose now.
@Danny: Yeah, you may well be right. The GOP has stated that their primary goal for the country is to ignore 14,000,000 unemployed Americans, and try to get that up to 14,000,001 by putting President Obama out of a job. That’s the shit they say on RECORD, too.
On the other hand, I think they’re scared of losing the House next year. So far, the initial reaction to Obama’s jobs plan has been surprisingly mild and conciliatory, suggesting that the fix may be in. It’s possible the Republicans are afraid people will catch on that they haven’t been doing shit. Check out this article for one scenario that might be in play.
from the actual text of the speech
“I’m also well aware that there are many Republicans who don’t believe we should raise taxes on those who are most fortunate and can best afford it. But here is what every American knows. While most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, a few of the most affluent citizens and corporations enjoy tax breaks and loopholes that nobody else gets. Right now, Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary – an outrage he has asked us to fix. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake, and everybody pays their fair share. And I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.”
now, it may just be all talk, and it requires the fucknecks in congress to actually give a damn, but for the first time in a long time he sounds like he’s actually trying. I do not however, believe that this has any chance of passing. Reality is that it is politically expedient for the republicans to block any kind of economic progress until after the elections because all of the problems get (sometimes correctly, often not) blamed solely on obama.
If Obama is sounding different it’s because he’s back in campaign mode.
Maybe when he’s in his final term he can actually be the progressive he pretends he is.
But, on topic, I don’t think anything Obama said has much to do with gender issues and I sort of think it’s odd (in a narrow lens sense) to paint them in that way.
Debaser, it’s a masculist blog, I’m gonna talk about men.
Just like if it were an anti-racist blog, I’d talk about the effect it would have on people of color. Obviously, the impact it has on men isn’t the most important issue in the speech; however, it is the most relevant issue to the blog, and I like to offer that perspective.