US president-elect Barack Obama on Saturday vowed to make the largest investment in the country’s infrastructure since the 1950s and bolster development of broadband Internet connections as part of his program to create 2.5 million jobs.
The announcement came less than a week after the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research officially said the US was in a recession, which began last December. The bureau defines an economic recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.”
Last month, Obama announced that he had asked his economic team to develop an economic recovery plan that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs, while rebuilding US infrastructure, improving schools, reducing the country’s dependence on foreign oil and saving billions of dollars. In his weekly radio address on Saturday, the president-elect unveiled five specific components of the plan that he believes will help the country overcome the recession.
“We won’t do it the old Washington way,” Obama said about his plan. “We won’t just throw money at the problem. We’ll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve — by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world.”
Under the plan, the Obama administration will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs.
“Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that,” the president-elect said.
The future Democratic president also pledged to create employment on a mass scale.
“We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s,” he said.
Obama said the plan also calls for launching a sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings by making them more energy-efficient and equipped with computers.
Obama also vowed to increase the accessibility of broadband Internet connections in the US, making them available to schoolchildren and hospitals.
VETERANS AFFAIRS
Meanwhile, Obama has chosen retired General Eric Shinseki to be the next Veterans Affairs secretary, turning to the former Army chief of staff once vilified by the administration of US President George W. Bush for questioning its Iraq war strategy.
Obama was to announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference yesterday in Chicago. He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of Veterans Affairs (VA) secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama’s Cabinet.
“I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home,” Obama said in a transcript of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that was to be broadcast yesterday.
Shinseki’s tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked by constant tensions with then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, which boiled over in 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand US troops to control Iraq after the invasion.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as “wildly off the mark” and the army general was ousted within months. But his words proved prophetic early last year when Bush announced a “surge” of troops to Iraq after miscalculating the numbers needed to stem sectarian violence.
Obama said he selected Shinseki for the VA post because he “was right” in predicting that the US would need more troops in Iraq than Rumsfeld believed at the time.
Shinseki, 66, is to take the helm of the government’s second-largest agency, which has been roundly criticized during the Bush administration for underestimating the amount of funding needed to treat thousands of injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thousands of veterans currently endure six-month waits for disability benefits, despite promises by current VA Secretary James Peake and his predecessor, Jim Nicholson, to reduce delays. The department is also scrambling to upgrade government technology systems before new legislation providing millions of dollars in new GI benefits takes effect next August.
Obama’s choice of Shinseki shows he is making good on his pledge to have a diverse Cabinet.
In Obama’s eight Cabinet announcements so far, white men are the minority with two nominations — Timothy Geithner at Treasury and Robert Gates at Defense. Three are women — Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security, Susan Rice as UN ambassador and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Eric Holder at the Justice Department is African American, while Bill Richardson at Commerce is Latino.
Also See: Obama faces China’s challenge
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
One of two tropical depressions that formed off Taiwan yesterday morning could turn into a moderate typhoon by the weekend, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Tropical Depression No. 21 formed at 8am about 1,850km off the southeast coast, CWA forecaster Lee Meng-hsuan (李孟軒) said. The weather system is expected to move northwest as it builds momentum, possibly intensifying this weekend into a typhoon, which would be called Mitag, Lee said. The radius of the storm is expected to reach almost 200km, she said. It is forecast to approach the southeast of Taiwan on Monday next week and pass through the Bashi Channel
NO CHANGE: The TRA makes clear that the US does not consider the status of Taiwan to have been determined by WWII-era documents, a former AIT deputy director said The American Institute in Taiwan’s (AIT) comments that World War-II era documents do not determine Taiwan’s political status accurately conveyed the US’ stance, the US Department of State said. An AIT spokesperson on Saturday said that a Chinese official mischaracterized World War II-era documents as stating that Taiwan was ceded to the China. The remarks from the US’ de facto embassy in Taiwan drew criticism from the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation, whose director said the comments put Taiwan in danger. The Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday reported that a US State Department spokesperson confirmed the AIT’s position. They added that the US would continue to
The number of Chinese spouses applying for dependent residency as well as long-term residency in Taiwan has decreased, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday, adding that the reduction of Chinese spouses staying or living in Taiwan is only one facet reflecting the general decrease in the number of people willing to get married in Taiwan. The number of Chinese spouses applying for dependent residency last year was 7,123, down by 2,931, or 29.15 percent, from the previous year. The same census showed that the number of Chinese spouses applying for long-term residency and receiving approval last year stood at 2,973, down 1,520,
RSS