As expected, President Obama's $447-billion jobs package failed to clear a key procedural hurdle in the Senate Tuesday evening,with two Democrats joining 46 Republicans in voting to effectively kill the bill in its current form.
Democratic leaders kept the roll call vote open late Tuesday evening in order to allow New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to return from an event in Boston to cast the 51st "yes" vote in favor of the measure, the Washington Post reports. But it was clear that the measure would fall well short of the 60 votes needed to break the GOP filibuster.
Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Jon Tester of Montana were the two Democrats who joined the GOP in blocking the bill. As Politico notes, Democratic leaders wereable to find a simple majority only thanks to"yes" votes from Sens. Joe Lieberman, Jim Webb and Joe Manchin, who said they opposed the president's plan but nonetheless voted to break the filibuster in the spirit of holding a debate.
POST at 10:42 a.m.: After weeks of demanding that lawmakers take up his jobs bill, President Obama will finally get hiswish – although he is unlikely to be happy with the outcome.
The Senate is scheduled to hold a procedure voteTuesday on the $447 billion package that would be financed, in large part, by a 5.6-percent surtax on American households with annual incomes of$1 million or more. But given the upper chamber’s partisan arithmetic, the measure appears destined for a relatively quick death.
Even if Senate Democratswere able to stay united – something that is unlikely – their 53 votes would still come up seven shy of the 60 needed to avoid a Republican filibuster.
The Washington Post notes that given the bill’s likely failure, the vote represents a potential headache for Democrats facing difficult reelection bids next year: “Vote for a billthat is probably headed for defeat, and they will be painted by opponents as too closely aligned with Obama. Butvote with Republicans against it, and they will undermine Obama’s claim that congressional Republicans have been the obstacle to his attempts to improve the economy.”
CNN with a quick refresher on what’s in the bill:
Among other things, the package includes an extension and expansionof the current payroll taxcut, an extension of jobless benefits to help the unemployed, new tax credits for businessesthat hire the long-term unemployed and additional money to help save and create jobs for teachers and first responders such as firemen.
The Associated Press has the administration’s pitch:
In making the case for the bill, the White House cites economists like Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, who predicts that the measure would add 2 percentage points of growth to the economy, add 1.9 millionpayroll jobs, and reduce unemployment by a percentage point. But Republicans point to optimistic predictions about the 2009 measure that didn't come to pass; unemployment hovers just above 9 percent nationwide.

Obama must fail. This is the highest priority of our Nation, our People, our God. TheGOP and Tea Party is working hard to fullfill the patriotic wishes of all Americans by defeating this bill. As we all know, Obama is a kenyan born, radical muslim socialist waging jihad against America from our WHITE House! What the Senate must do, is pass additional taxcuts for the Job Creator class. These can be funded once we ended governement handouts like Socialism Security, Mediscam, and so called unemployment"benefits"!

Partisan gridlock in Washington while Americans everywhere suffer is
nothing to celebrate. This was a reasonable bill put forth in a timely
manner and our do-nothing Congress is wasting time bickering while the
economy stumbles into recession.

This was not a bad bill. The partisan rejection though is awful
politics. The Wall St. protests are the tip of the iceberg. Ordinary
people - the jobless and under insured are getting extremely angry
and frustrated and they will 1) vote and 2) revolt.

I thank the Obama administration for their pro-active leadership and
making an attempt to bring in a good jobs bill at a time when it really
could have done a lot of good.

The idiots who threatened our creditors with default in the earlier
pointless grandstanding brinksmanship that led to the first US credit
downgrade in recent history are still at their economy damaging ways.
That history will surely prove them wrong is no consolation to those
who are fed up with the growing economic disparity in this country and
the willingness of the rich in Congress to sacrifice the lives of
ordinary Americans for the sake of making political points during a
time of severe hardship and recession.

really no surprise, ,,

I consider it amazing that he gets ANYTHING done with the pledged opposition many congress have taken against HIM personally,,,

but he is no stranger to it, and we keep fighting,,,,

The 2009 stimulus bill actually did work, at least to prevent a worse catastrophe, but becauseit didn't immediately cure everything overnight, the Republicans have been able to convince a substantial number of people with too-short attention spans and no real knowledge of macroeconomics that they "didn't work."
It's understandable, though; few people can really can really conceiveof the magnitude of the financial trouble the Republicans put the United States in during the Bush II Administration. In fact, I doubt the Republicans can even conceive of it themselves, the numberswere (and still are) so staggeringly huge.
Obama may not be the ideal man for the job, but regardless, to elect any Republicans at this point, to any high office whatsoever, would be tantamount to national suicide.

to gain support for the 2009 stimulus the administration estimated that the unemployment rate would be at 6.5% within eighteen months. it's now been two years and we're still above 9%. how can anybody say the stimulus package worked if the topic is jobs? it's purpose was to meke things better, not to keep them from getting any worse. is the economy any better today than it was two years ago? that's the question. this so called jobs bill was tossed because it was based on the same flawed logic that the stimulus package was. a government simply cannot spend the county's way out of bad economic times.

The bill wll help the economy. A broad consensus of ecomnomists, including ones with ties to the Republican Party, says so. Since when did the fact that a bill is not a magic bullet that will instantly fix all the nation's problems a justification for voting against it? The people playing politics here are the Republicans.

Unemployment Rate Would Have Hit 14.5% Without 2009 Stimulus.

Stimulus and TARP Boosted GDP 6.5%, Saved 8.5 Million Jobs
August 2, 2010 by Jon Geeting

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s and John McCain campaign economic advisor, and Alan Blinder of Princeton have a new paper out measuring the impact of the financial rescue and the Recovery Act. Here’s the key finding: “GDP in 2010 would be about 6½% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.”

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains:

Regardless of what the polls say, the facts are that the financial stabilization and fiscal stimulus worked the way they were intended to. The economy stopped its steep slide and has begun to turn around.

Does that mean the job is done? Not by a long shot. Today’s report shows that GDP growth slowed to a disappointing 2.4 percent in the second quarter. That’s barely enough to keep up with growth in the economy’s potential to produce goods and services stemming from labor force and productivity increases. Growth of 4 percent or better is needed to get the economy moving back toward full employment.

Thus far, unfortunately, misguided opposition has delayed (in the case of extra weeks of unemployment benefits) or prevented (in the case of extended state fiscal assistance) further job-creating stimulus.

Of course, we lost many more jobs than that, and the stimulus was always too small to bring the economy back to full employment:

Those of us who say that the stimulus was too small are often accused of after-the-fact rationalization… But the… answer is that it’s all in the math: Keynesian analysis provides numbers as well as qualitative predictions, and given reasonable projections of the economy’s path in January 2009, the proposed stimulus just wasn’t big enough. Let’s go back to the tape, January 9, 2009:

Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things. To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough…. [T]he Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

In practice, it was even worse, because one of the key elements of the plan — aid to state and local governments — was cut back sharply in the Senate. We ended up with only about $600 billion of real stimulus over that two-year period.

So this wasn’t a test of fiscal stimulus, even though it has played out that way in the political arena: the whole thing was obviously underpowered from the start.

http://www.jongeeting.net/?p=408

The patriotic wishes of all Americans? It's patriotic and American to want the President to fail?

What is the GOP doing to ensure jobs are created?

The Senate bill needed to be defeated for sure. It didn't have any clause stating the jobs that would be created could not be filled by illegal immigrants.

says who? tell me how YOU think the stimulus positively affected the employment figures. not here to read articles or links i can find on my own. here to discuss real topics with real people. so tell me what YOU think. wherever you heard the 14.5 number, tell me YOUR reasoning as to why you think it's prediction of the future back in 2009 make sense TO YOU.

here's what you folks just don't get. gop, democrats, bubbacrats, dubyacans, or ron paulianas, or whatever political party, THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT LEGISLATE JOB CREATION. sheesh.

hmm

so dont create jobs for ANY AMERICANS because of the chance that SOME ILLEGAL immigrants might become employed? seems like cutting off the nose to spite the face to me,,,

Wasn't that something Boehner and the Republicans campaigned on? Fixing unemployment and creating jobs?

panic and business decline,, allowing banks to fail would have also (in my opinion)

A. Caused panic amongst citizens who bank(most of us)

and

B. Caused businesses to fail and shut down

I think these two things would have a catastrophic affect. Businesses failing and shutting down would obviously impact the unemployment rate. The fewer people are working, the less they are able to purchase, the less people are purchasing the lower businesses have to go on their own prices, the lower businesses go on prices the lower profits they retain, the lower the profits the higher the chance of having to shut down,,,businesses shutting down creates unemployment,,,,and so on, and so on, and so on,,,

I think that is why the term 'stimulus' is relevant, as opposed to 'creation'


Government can pass tax policies, by way of cuts and incentives , to STIMULATE and encourage job creation

they can also legislate improvements in education which stimulates employment by creating an atmosphere of better qualified applicants

As long as they continue to conterfiet our money...

ANY attempt to 'push' the economy will backfire.

One cannot build a proper foundation with paper. (no matter how much you 'fluff' up the roll).

not a clue who campaigned on what. job creation cannot be legislated be it the republicans saying they can or the democrats.

The stimulus bailed out states.

It was done in the hopes that the recovery would begin by the time the funds ran out.

It hasn't.

Now to think that doing the same thing would work this time when you have the crisis in Europe and the Chinese economy on the brink is just stupid.

This bill is nothing more than the usual political scheme.

Smoke and mirrors..