HispanicBusiness

As he was traveling in Europe and Africa last week, President Barack Obama had to come out to defend his economic reactivation plan. He first softened the statement made by Vice President Joe Biden that the state of the economy was misread. Instead, President Obama said, there was "incomplete information" about the economy. But, even so, "there's nothing we would have done differently." Additionally, President Obama's weekly address, last Saturday, was dedicated to the economic recovery and to the jobs of the future. Finally, the President Obama published an op-ed piece, in Sunday's Washington Post, stating that what will be rebuilt, after the wreckage is cleared away, has to be better than before.

In this way, the President tried to counter the mounting criticism, emanating from both the right and left of the political spectrum, fed by the recently surprising loss of 433,000 jobs in June.

Among prominent academic economists on the Left, such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, the job losses in June confirm the need to approve another economic stimulus package. While on the Right, Edward Lazear, former chief economic advisor to President Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the unemployment figures were evidence that the so-called stimulus "is just a smokescreen for a permanent expansion of government,"

The government is now placed in the middle of these two positions. As declared by the President's chief economist Lawrence Summers, "the stimulus is on track." Also, 43 of 51 economists, surveyed by the Wall Street Journal, said there is no need for another stimulus package.

Isaac Cohen is the former director of the Washington Office of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). He is a commentator on economic and financial issues for CNN en Espanol TV and radio.