Does President Obama have the right economic plan overall?

Cenk Uygur:  Does President Obama have the right economic plan overall?  I’m not so sure.

Jimmy Dore:  No, he doesn’t have the right plan overall.  I don’t even know how these jobs are being created right now because he is not proposing measures to fix our problems.  And by the way, it’s good news that we created those jobs but that’s not even half of what we need to keep up….He’s not even proposing solutions to our problems.  He’s still not.  I’ve heard a lot of economists say that they are afraid of the [employment] numbers going back down again. 

Cenk Uygur:  At this rate, including the population growth, in order to get back to where we were, we still lost 5 million jobs overall in the recession, it would take till about 2087, I’m exaggerating, but an unbelievable period of time.

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But in the long term, I am afraid that we have not solved any of the underlying problems.  We still have all of these houses underwater, trillions of dollars worth, and we didn’t address that.  We didn’t hold any of the bankers accountable; they can still take those crazy risks.  I am afraid that that’s going to blow up the economy at any given time.

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Jimmy Dore:  When you say that he had initiatives for creating jobs …how many jobs was that projected to create?  A million or two jobs?  We needed twenty-five million jobs.

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Cenk Uygur:  I think Jimmy is right here.  President Obama had a decision to make right in the beginning.  was he going to go large:  hey, we are going to do a smart energy grid; we are going to do transportation on a grand scale, which we needed.  We needed infrastructure on a grand scale.  He chose not to because he was afraid of Republican reaction.  God, I wish he made a different decision.

[The discussion now concerns Obama’s healthcare bill.]

Michael Shure:  …If there is an area of Obama policy where I believe that he did not go far enough, it is with Obamacare.  There was a poll taken in September of 2010, before the Congress turned over that November, that showed that the people who thought that the healthcare plan was too conservative outweighed those who did not like it by two to one.  That was an Associated Press poll.  People liked the healthcare then.  The Obama team did a terrible job, as you said over and over, of selling it, and of being on the offense and then going far enough.

Jimmy Dore:  …Wasn’t that a mistake to not implement [all of the healthcare benefits] right away [instead of deferring them to 2014]?

Cenk Uygur:  I always thought that waiting till 2014 was a terrible idea….But I think it was the wrong decision honestly.