President Obama spent the afternoon in Mountain View, California today and took part in a town hall meeting on job creation hosted by the professional networking website LinkedIn.
This event is part of a west coast trip for the President which includes stops in Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He took questions from LinkedIn employees and members, as well as questions submitted online at the LinkedIn website.
The President has been crisscrossing the country to promote his American Jobs Act, which he sent to Congress two weeks ago.
Also today, Federal Reserve Board member Sarah Bloom Raskin spoke about monetary policy and the role the Fed and other central banks can play in helping to create jobs.
Raskin said in a speech last week that the job market is actually in worse shape than what’s indicated by the headline 9.1% unemployment rate. “One of the tragedies of our current lingering recession is that so many young Americans have not been able to experience the thrilling rite of passage that comes with finding a stable and decent-paying job,” she said in remarks at an event hosted by the New America Foundation.
The President's jobs plan includes a payroll tax cut to 3.1% for all workers, a 50% payroll tax cut for employers with less than $5 million in wages, $30 billion in spending on improvements to schools and $50 billion for roads and bridges.
The proposal also includes an extension of unemployment benefits, $35 billion in aid to local governments to help them retain teachers, first responders, and other state employees, and a one-year tax break that allows business to deduct the full value of new equipment purchased, instead of the current 50% deduction.