Greetings from Spain! That’s right. I have moved to Madrid for the year, where I will be studying at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus.

Things are in many ways better here, especially those things that involve sunlight and a complete lack of humidity. Other things, that are not so much better as they are intriguing involve a language I do not yet understand, a currency with 5 percent more coins than are really necessary and the time difference.

Oh, that time difference. Seven hours. If I assume that the demand for this paper is such that you read this the instant it hits the stands, it’ll be about 6:45 p.m. where I am. Think about that, if only for a second. (6:45:01 p.m., then.) A whole seven hours. A lot can happen in that time.

For instance, I woke up the other day to discover that President Obama had announced a brand new jobs plan.

This was exciting. Would he announce billions of dollars in government funding for new construction projects nation-wide? Would I return to a country with hundreds of thousands of new teachers? Massive numbers of new or refurbished schools? A national infrastructure worth using?

Well, maybe. A large part of the $450 billion jobs bill is made up of tax cuts for things like new hires.

Figures released from the White House suggest that people working at a small construction firm of 50 workers, earning $50,000 a year “would receive an average tax cut of about $1,500 a year,” which will really help those workers pay down their debt.  Temporary tax cuts or refunds, however, are not typically used to make new, economy-boosting purchases. They’re used to pay off debt from earlier purchases or add to savings.

The problem is that in a bad economy, people aren’t buying things. So corporations aren’t hiring. Hence, the very, very small (relatively speaking) tax bonus doesn’t make up for the revenue you still won’t be making. This is a huge problem here in Spain: Record unemployment levels (above 40 percent for youth) means that people have less money with which to buy things, so businesses don’t hire new workers.

Rinse. Repeat.

In the end, you wind up with about $140 billion for rebuilding and re-hiring the nation. It just isn’t enough. Even the $35 billion for teachers (numbers by Robert Reich) just won’t save us, and $140 billion isn’t enough to rebuild our schools, roads, public facilities, etc. The teachers with a building to get to won’t necessarily be able to do so. And if we don’t have teachers teaching, then we won’t have kids with diplomas and then we won’t have an educated work force.

So you see the problem.

It’s pretty obvious that this is a re-election plan more than it is a jobs plan. Either it passes unchanged, and makes him look like the man-who-saved-our-economy, or it is held up for months by Republicans and makes them look like unnecessarily confrontational meanies (which, by the by, they are).

So, the President is already composing a list of decor changes for his second term. However, he should put away the doilies and get out the check book, because it’s time to spend, baby, spend!

We need to put people to work. We need to repair our country. We need to employ more teachers. So it’s time to descend further into debt. To focus on nothing more than the best and most efficient ways to improve the country we live in. Yes, this means governmental intervention into our daily lives. But hey, the private sector sure hasn’t been up the challenge.

And this is capitalism, right?

It’s time for another business to take over. It isn’t as though private companies couldn’t be paid by the government to do the work that needs to be done, but enough of them (no Haliburton corporate consortium here, folks!) need to be hired, and all over the country, so that new employees are an outright necessity.

There are people far wiser than myself who can tackle the destinations for my dream overload of federal funding – Elizabeth Warren (who, praise be, is running for senate), Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, etc. – but the point is this: Nice try, Mr. President, but sometimes, for the good of the country, we need to spend real capital instead of trying to bank political capital.

Noah Berman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.