Obama Offers Help for Small Bizs

In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama outlined proposals intended to promote job creation.

They included incentives for small businesses to hire more workers, additional money to build roads and other construction projects and rebates for homeowners who invest in energy-saving weatherizing improvements, reports The New York Times.

Obama did not put a price on the proposals, which would add to the $787 billion that Congress allocated last winter to revive the economy. But he said the cost could be offset by some of the $200 billion in lower-than-expected spending on the bailout of financial institutions.

More than half of the original stimulus package remains in the pipeline, with many road building and construction projects beginning in 2010. But Obama, in his address at the Brookings Institution, a policy research organization, said further stimulus is needed to spur employers to hire and bring down a jobless rate that stands at 10 percent.

“Our work is far from done,” he said. “For even though we’ve reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who’ve been swept up in the flood.”

Photo by Reuters.

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