Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.
Ever since President Obama released his jobs plan earlier this month, Republicans have been claiming that it will not the help the economy. “What the president’s proposed so far is not serious. And it’s not a jobs plan,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “I just don’t think that is really going to help our economy the way it should,” added Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). Many Republicans derided the plan as a “second stimulus,” ignoring the success of the first.
However, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, the jobs plan that President Obama introduced would help prevent a double-dip recession by boosting economic growth and bringing down unemployment next year:
President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.
Though they weren’t overly optimistic that the plan would lead to loads of new hires, the economists said that the plan “prevents a serious drag on the economy next year.” The White House has expressed a desire to have a vote on the jobs plan take place next month, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said that the plan will not come up for a vote until the Senate votes on a bill that would crack down on China’s currency manipulation.
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.