Obama Tackles Jobless Woes, but Warns of Limited Funds

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday hosted a forum with scores of business and labor leaders and economic advisers to both political parties to field “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”
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The president said he would announce some new ideas of his own next week, which are likely to include a home-retrofitting proposal modeled on the popular “cash for clunkers” program that has particularly captured Mr. Obama’s imagination, according to aides.

Called “cash for caulkers,” it would offer government incentives to make homes and small businesses energy efficient, enlisting home-improvement companies like Lowe’s and Sears to advertise the benefits much as car dealers did for the clunker trade-ins earlier this year.

Opening Thursday’s panel discussions, however, Mr. Obama said he was in a listening mode.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included critics as well as executives from American Airlines, Nucor Corp., Google Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Fed-Ex.

Mr. Obama told the chief executives that he wanted to know: “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring? And if there are things that we’re doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”

The timing of the event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president at the end of his first year. It followed by a day his long-awaited decision to send 30,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, and came on the eve of Friday’s monthly unemployment report that is expected to show that while job losses continued to decline in November, the overall rate of unemployment remained stubbornly at 10 percent, where it is expected to hover for much of next year.

Both the domestic and the military demands are raising costs — which were unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office — even as pressures build to arrest annual budget deficits now exceeding $1 trillion. They also are eroding the broad support that swept him into office, especially among independent voters, and igniting a guns-versus-butter budget debate in his own party not seen since the Vietnam era.

Just as Mr. Obama said in his Afghanistan speech on Tuesday night that the United States could not afford an open-ended commitment, especially when the economy is so weak, he emphasized the limits of the government’s role after his own $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout he inherited.

“When we walked in, there was an enormous fiscal gap between the money that is going out and the money coming in,” he said. “The recession has made that worse because of fewer tax receipts and more demands made on government for things like unemployment insurance.”

Both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who introduced him, emphasized that the financial industry has stabilized and the stimulus package has created or saved up to 1.6 million jobs, according to recent nonpartisan analyses. But their remarks underscored the administration’s defensiveness at times as Republicans have seized on the higher-than-anticipated joblessness to argue that the Obama policies not only are not working but are exacerbating businesses’ uncertainty about the future.

Indeed, House Republicans leaders hosted their own hastily convened jobs forum on Thursday, just before Mr. Obama’s, to underscore that point.

“The American people are asking, ‘where are the jobs?’ but all they are getting from Washington Democrats is more spending, more debt, and more policies that hurt small businesses,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, in opening his roundtable with Republican economists and lawmakers.

House Democratic leaders, in the meantime, were compiling their own proposals for additional spending on roads and infrastructure building, expanded lending and tax incentives for small businesses. They want to pass a bill this month, but the Senate is not likely to act until early next year.

Congressional Democrats are particularly worried about their own jobs as they face re-election next year amid declining support in national polls. Whatever they and the administration come up with, economists generally agree that they are likely to find that unemployment will remain high for some time.

Mr. Obama noted that job growth typically lags when the economy recovers from a recession. “But,” he added, “we cannot hang back and hope for the best when we’ve seen the kinds of job losses that we’ve seen over the last year. I am not interested in taking a wait and see approach when it comes to creating jobs. What I’m interested in is taking action right now to help businesses create jobs — right now, in the near term.”