Will Americans endure for the greater purpose? 2.15.09

President Barrack Obama gave his first presidential press conference Last Monday, February ninth. In this conference, Mr. Obama incessantly displayed his focus and dedication to the $787bn stimulus plan that just cleared US Congress late Friday night.

As bipartisan conflicts continued to play an impediment to the stimulus plan during the first few weeks of his presidency, Mr. Obama explained that he knew it would take time to break old habits as such in congress. He also openly asked in the introduction of the conference for all of congress to act without delay and set their differences aside.

Mr. Obama candidly admitted in his speech that the plan is not perfect, and that no plan is. But with that he swore, “With complete confidence, that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.”

Mr. Obama’s compelling introduction for the conference tackled many concerns on American’s minds. He confronted the nation saying “My administration inherited a deficit of over one trillion dollars. But because we also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the great depression, doing little or nothing at all will result in even greater deficits, even greater job loss, even greater loss of income, and even greater loss of confidence. Those are deficits that could turn a crisis into a catastrophe and I refuse to let that happen. As long as I hold this office, I will do whatever it takes to get this economy back on track and put this country back to work.”

According to Daniel Dombey and Edward Luce, writers for Financialtimes.com, “The $787bn package… represents the most important legislative effort yet to pull the US out of its recession.” They also mention the fact that this stimulus plan is the largest economic stimulus in US history, and that it happened in the first four weeks of Mr. Obama’s presidency.

Repeatedly in the conference, Mr. Obama stressed that his main goal with this stimulus package is to create four million jobs. In the introduction, he explains that earlier that day he had visited Elkhart Indiana, the town in the United States that is suffering the greatest job losses thus far. In the last year, Elkhart- with a population of 52,000 residents- went from 4.7% unemployment to 15.3% unemployment.

Last month the United States lost 598,000 jobs. That number is equivalent to every job in Maine. It is for this extreme reason that the $787bn stimulus plan has been written and passed through congress, ready for him to sign into law, within such a short amount of time.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill could increase employment in a range of 800,000 to 2.3 million jobs by the end of 2009 and 1.2 million to 3.6 million by the end of 2010.

“For the sake of my future career and for all the other students of our generation, I pray to god this stimulus succeeds,” says Denver Jensen, a business major at SLCC.

Now the nation must wait while trying to cooperate with the plan’s goals to discover what success it will offer or not.

President Obama wrapped up the introduction to the conference saying, “The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate. But they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in service of a greater purpose.”