Relocation Information In Charlotte NC? Obama Hails Jobs Report turning the corner on recession

April 2, 2010 - PRLog -- Visiting a plant that received federal money from his economic stimulus package and that is now creating new jobs, Mr. Obama said “today is an encouraging day” because the fruits of his programs were becoming visible. But he cautioned that more difficult times were still ahead before the country reclaimed the economic ground lost in the past few years.

“This has been a harrowing time for our country, and it’s easy to grow cynical and wonder whether America’s best days are behind us, especially after such a crisis,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of workers in a hangarlike building, surrounded by racks of battery material. “What we can see here at this plant is, the worst of the storm is over, that brighter days are still ahead.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama said, “While we’ve come a long way, we’ve still got a ways to go.” He added: “Government can’t reverse the toll of this recession overnight. And government on its own can’t replace the eight million jobs that have been lost.”

Mr. Obama was responding to a Labor Department report indicating that the economy added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in March, the most in three years. He noted that a year ago, the economy was losing as many as 700,000 jobs a month.

To an extent, the growth in March was exaggerated by the government’s hiring of 48,000 census workers to conduct the once-a-decade national head count, jobs that will mainly last only a few months. Moreover, the unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent in March, and economists expect it to rise later in the year as discouraged workers resume looking for jobs.

Republicans pointed out that though Mr. Obama was emphasizing the payroll numbers, unemployment still remained significantly higher than the White House initially forecast it would be at this point even if Congress had not enacted the $787 billion stimulus package last year. What then, they asked, had the stimulus actually achieved?

Still, the new figures provided a political boost for the president less than a week after he signed the final elements of his landmark health care overhaul into law and finished an arms control treaty with Russia. After months on the defensive — with his poll numbers falling, his legislative program stalled and the economy still fallow — Mr. Obama now appears to feel reinvigorated.

To highlight his economic agenda, he flew to Charlotte to visit Celgard, a firm that produces material for lithium batteries and has received $49 million from the stimulus program. The company is expanding its Charlotte plant and building a new facility in nearby Concord. Mr. Obama said the stimulus money was helping Celgard create 300 new jobs directly and as many as 1,000 new jobs for suppliers and contractors.

But The Charlotte Observer, citing the Energy Department, reported that Celgard had not yet begun spending any of the stimulus money. And at least some residents of the area were not satisfied, as they gathered along Mr. Obama’s motorcade route holding up signs like “You Lie,” “Vote Them Out” and “Stop Spending My Future.”

North Carolina is the fourth swing state Mr. Obama has visited in the past week or so, following Iowa, Virginia and Maine. He won all four of them in 2008, but the White House is carefully tending to all of them given the flight of independents from Mr. Obama recorded in recent polls.

Taking questions from Celgard workers, Mr. Obama fielded mostly friendly inquiries. But when a woman asked why he was raising taxes in the health care program, “because we’re overtaxed as it is,” Mr. Obama bemoaned what he called “a whole lot of misinformation” and talked for a long time about the virtues of the overhaul before actually addressing taxes.

When he did respond to her question, he said that the health care program was financed in part by “some additional taxes that we think are fair,” and he cited a provision imposing Medicare taxes on capital gains and dividend income, which will affect primarily wealthier Americans.

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