Report: Corporate America Is Sitting On The Solution To The Jobs Crisis

Last September this news blog posted an article saying:

American corporations are holding more cash on their balance sheets than at any time in nearly a half century, as they continue to save instead of investing or hiring workers, according to a Federal Reserve report released last Friday. At the same time, Republican presidential candidates and corporate leaders continue to lobby for lower corporate tax rates and huge corporate tax giveaways under the guise that they will lead to higher rates of job creation.

According to the report, non-financial corporations held more than $2 trillion in cash at the end of June, a $88 billion jump since the end of March. Cash holdings made up 7.1 percent of all company assets, the highest level since 1963.

According to a new report from a group of University of Massachusetts economists America's largest banks and non-financial companies are now sitting on $3.6 trillion in cash. If banks and non-financial companies would stop hoarding the $3.6 trillion in cash they have accumulated and move it into productive investments, the report estimates that about 19 million jobs would be created in the next three years, lowering the unemployment rate to under 5 percent.

"There is no reason that the U.S. needs to remain stuck in a long-term unemployment crisis," Robert Pollin, lead author of the report and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, said in a statement accompanying the report's release Tuesday.

"Getting the banks and corporations to move their hoards into productive investments and job creation requires carrots and sticks -- policies such as a new round of government spending stimulus as well as taxes on the banks' excess reserves -- that can both strengthen overall market demand and unlock credit markets for small businesses," Pollin said.

Obama Addresses Issues In Terms Of Basic Fairness

The "Occupy" movement has changed our country’s political conversation. One only needs to listen to the speech Pres. Barack Obama gave in Osawatomie, Kansas, today, to understand how the conversation has changed since the GOP controlled House twice threatened to shut down government earlier this year in the Republican bid to make draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

For much of 2011, Obama’s speeches followed the Tea Party controlled Republican Party's lead on draconian cuts to federal safety-net programs for seniors and veterans. Today the central theme of Obama’s speech was income inequality—and how this mounting problem weakens our economy and our democracy. At long last, the president sounded like he was channeling his inner Elizabeth Warren.

Robert Reich: "The President’s speech today in Osawatomie, Kansas — where Teddy Roosevelt gave his “New Nationalism” speech in 1910 — is the most important economic speech of his presidency in terms of connecting the dots, laying out the reasons behind our economic and political crises, and asserting a willingness to take on the powerful and the privileged that have gamed the system to their advantage."

President Barack Obama promotes an economy and a government that works for the 99 percent in a speech on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2011, at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kan. To read the prepared text click here.

Obama’s pivot away from the GOP's austerity orthodoxy and toward public investment began with his jobs speech in September.

Since his September "jobs speech" Obama has continued to sharpened his populist focus in response to pressure from Occupy Wall Street.

Obama is again sounding like a progressive tackling issues in terms of basic fairness and attacking the GOP’s brand of conservative “your-on-your-own economics” in a much more direct way.

Obama called for a new approach to addressing America’s current economic challenges. In calling for a new approach Obama fires a shot across the bow of 30 years of conservative economic theory; Trickle down economics, the conservative theory embraced by Ronald Reagan and virtually every conservative since, “doesn’t work,” Obama declared. And even as conservatives have clung to the idea in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, “it has never worked,” Obama added:

'Obamacare' To The Rescue

A woman who believed the GOP Obamacare negative propaganda was so upset with President Obama for having "let down the struggling middle class" that she switched her registration from Democrat to Independent and altered her Obama bumpers sticker to read "Got Nope" is apologizing to the President. She says that while she was angered by Obama's plan, she's suddenly come to appreciate it, now that she's benefitting from it personally.

Two years ago, Spike Dolomite Ward and her husband had to choose between paying their mortgage or keeping their health insurance. They kept the house, and now at 49 Ward has been diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn't know how she'd afford months of expensive treatment, until he discovered the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, which is part of Obama's healthcare plan. Now she's publicly "outed" herself in the hopes that she can teach ObamaCare opponents that the uninsured aren't just lazy freeloaders. She writes:

LA Times

I want to apologize to President Obama. But first, some background.

I found out three weeks ago I have cancer. I'm 49 years old, have been married for almost 20 years and have two kids. My husband has his own small computer business, and I run a small nonprofit in the San Fernando Valley. I am also an artist. Money is tight, and we don't spend it frivolously. We're just ordinary, middle-class people, making an honest living, raising great kids and participating in our community, the kids' schools and church.

We're good people, and we work hard. But we haven't been able to afford health insurance for more than two years. And now I have third-stage breast cancer and am facing months of expensive treatment.

ObamaCare’s Hidden Time Bomb That Benefits Every Insured American

PoliticusUSA

There are times that the title of legislation does not adequately describe the nature and purpose of a law that leads to confusion and uncertainty in the population. In March 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law and over this past weekend, one specific provision of the law went into effect and it epitomizes the meaning of the law irrespective of all the other benefits to Americans. All at once, the law’s detractors on the professional left and wary Americans will see immediate benefits that will change the nature of health care insurance for the better and it has the potential to push health care in America toward a single-payer, universal care system.

The provision that seemed to be buried in the extensive law, the medical loss ratio, requires health insurance companies to spend 80-85% of consumer’s premiums on real medical care and not overhead, profits, or marketing expenses. If insurers fail to meet the requirement, they are bound by the law to send rebate checks to consumers “representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.” Now, before any conservative or naysayer claims the provision is not workable or true, California school teachers began receiving their rebate checks on Friday for premiums they paid that were not used for medical care. According to a report in Forbes, “This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.”