Thursday, 20 May 2010
US President Mr Barack Obama used USD 650 million expansion of V&M's mill to make the case that his policies pulled the economy from the abyss and are beginning to create jobs.

Noting that the new 1 million-square-foot mill is the largest industrial plant to be built in the Mahoning Valley since General Motors opened the nearby Lordstown plant in 1960, Mr Obama said a mill like V&M becomes an economic lifeline to a community, because it creates hundreds of spin off jobs.

He said “Now, I don't want to suggest this one plant and the jobs it will create are going to make the difference for an entire community. But consider, for a moment, where we were just over a year ago. Our economy was shrinking. Our businesses were losing 750,000 jobs a month. Economists across the spectrum were seriously warning of another Great Depression. And all of this was on top of one of the toughest decades America's middle class has ever faced.”

Mr Obama said he was forced to take difficult and controversial measures when he took office last year to stabilize the economy, standing up to the naysayers in Washington who look for the cloud around every silver lining. As a result, he said, the economy is growing again, gaining 290,000 jobs nationwide last month, the largest increase in four years. In April, manufacturing employment registered the largest increase since 1988.

Mr Obama said “Rescuing the economy required some steps that were, frankly, unpopular steps like stabilizing a financial system on the brink of collapse, and intervening in an auto industry on the brink of extinction. I knew those steps would be largely unpopular. I also knew that politics being what it is, some folks would try to score some political points off them.”

He told “But I think any fair minded person would say that if we hadn't acted, more people in the Mahoning Valley, more people in Ohio, and more people across America would be out of work today. We know, for example, that the GM plant over in Lordstown wouldn't be there. GM would be defunct.”

V&M decided to expand in Youngstown, in part because the state committed about USD 20 million of its share of federal stimulus money to build new roadways and a rail spur to the plant. The project will create 400 construction jobs and 350 full time production jobs at V&M, which currently employs about 440.

Republicans dispute that the stimulus and Obama's other economic policies have worked, noting that job loss and the unemployment rate both have continued to increase since the USD 787 billion stimulus package was passed in February 2009.