Obama is a green thumb.
Although the terror incident (an attempt to blow up a Delta Airlines plane approaching US soil) in Christmas changed his agenda, US president Barak Obama has returned to focus on American economy and promoted a new initiative to create thousand of jobs in the clean energy sector. This comes after the new government’s report on the unemployment rate, which doubts the financial recovery.
Obama announced on the awarding of $2.3 billion in tax credits to companies that manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, cutting edge batteries and other green technologies. The money will come from last year’s $787 billion stimulus program. With this tax relief he will create 17 thousand green jobs. According to him, more than 180 projects in 40 different states will receive the the tax relief.
“The jobs numbers are reminder that the road to recovery is never straight,” the president said, adding that the overall trend was improving. It was only the fact that many workers went out of the American job market’s statistics the prevented the unemployment rate to cross the 10% line in December, according to economists. If the size of the market wouldn’t have shrunk in 661 thousand workers last month, the unemployment rate would have been 10.4% the experts explained.
Experts believe that the real unemployment rate is higher than official stats, since the economy surprisingly lost 85 thousand jobs in December, but the unemployment rate remained the same. Almost 1.7 million American went out of the labor force between July and December, a 1.1% descent which is the biggest half-annual drop since 1961.
