September 8, 2011 President Obama met with Congress and revealed his American Jobs Act. According to Obama, the Jobs Act is intended to create more jobs for construction workers, teachers, veterans, and those that have been unemployed for over six months, as well as provide tax cuts for hiring companies, small businesses and working Americans. All of these are necessities that America has been straining for in the past few years, but when it comes to finding a payment method for the project that will require an increase to the 1.5 trillion dollars due from Congress savings by Christmas, not all parties are certain that extra cost will be beneficial to American citizens.

“I think the American Jobs Act…is just the original stimulus package split in half. And considering that the first stimulus package was a complete failure and has led to a double-dip recession, I have little reason to believe that this jobs act will live up to its name,” said Bethany D. Greene, president of UNCW College Republicans. The stimulus package Greene mentioned was first brought up by President-Elect Obama in 2008 when unemployment rose to 6.5 percent, and was promised to be the first item addressed in his term as President of the U.S.

Greene continued that Obama should try a different approach, one that requires “cutting taxes, reducing regulations on businesses, and making it to where businesses are confident that things will improve…to hire new workers.”

Wednesday Sept. 14, Obama paid a visit to North Carolina’s capital and presented his plan to students at NC State. Greene states that this visit was “little more than a campaign trip funded by taxpayers,” but Ian McDermott, College Democrats president for UNCW, disagrees.

“I was in Raleigh for the President’s address at NC State and I think that his plan has the right stuff,” says McDermott, “Specifically, preventing the layoffs of teachers, cops, firefighters and other first responder I’m very optimistic about its passage, especially if its supporters are willing to press their representatives in the coming weeks.”

Yet supporters may be difficult to find. When questioned on the matter of Obama’s speech, very few students had heard of the American Jobs Act. On YouTube, the full address to Congress received less than 90,000 views. There are over 300 million Americans. In simple math, this means that roughly 0.03 percent of Americans viewed the video from the world’s most popular video viewing site in the past week.

Why is it that such influential politics are undermined by videos like “Webcam 101 for Seniors” that earn over six million views in the space of one month?  Are the American people tired of the seemingly-constant struggle to stave off debt and unemployment? Losing interest during times of great stress and frustration will hardly pull America out of its recession, and you don’t have to be in Congress to follow the advice of our president when he stated, “But we can help. We can make a difference. There are steps we can take right now to improve people’s lives.”