Obama's Weekly Address - The "Pay Later" Plan to Financial Recovery

No one can accuse President-elect Obama of sugarcoating the truth.

He hasn't officially taken office yet and is already predicting our country's fiscal woes could last for years and the unemployment rate could reach double digits.

That is why anyone who wants to see this country get economically healthy again should cheer the Obama American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that he detailed in his weekly message to the nation this week.

Under the plan, Obama projects that nation will save or create upwards of four million jobs. The number sounds unrealistic at first blush but when one realizes the country lost more than 500,000 last month alone, Obama's goal for job creation seems modest and reachable.

Nearly a half million jobs will be created by investing in clean energy, according to the plan, by modernizing most of the federal buildings and improving energy efficiency of two million American homes. The jobs will come from building solar panels, wind turbines, fuel efficient cars and other energy saving technologies.

Whether there is a market for all of these devices is in question among economists. That is why this investment with take massive amounts of cash from the federal government to finance the plan.

Now we all have seen this movie before.

The billions of dollars spent will kick-start the economy for a while and may even launch a sustained economic turnaround that is so badly needed. But two or three years from now, when the bills start rolling in for the billion dollar-plus blank checks we will be writing now, the national deficit will skyrocket.

Obama critics will scream that our national security is being put at risk by the growing debt. Others will say we are mortgaging our children's financial futures saddling them with massive bills.

That may all be true but at this point, we as a nation have no choice. Obama is right to put his emphasis on digging the country out of its fiscal crisis now. All we can hope is that waste and fraud, the two-headed monster that often accompanies massive spending progams, is held in check.

The tagline of a 1970's television commercial boils down our predicament better than any government report. A cranky old mechanic looks at a beleaguered car owner and issues an ominous warning "You can pay me now or pay me later."

_________________

Paul Shepard blogs the Democrat side of politics for BlackVoices. He has been a journalist for 16 years; on the national urban/minority affairs beat for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and for The AP in Washington, D.C. He now runs his own public affairs firm Shepard Strategic Communications.