WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan will favor long-term infrastructure and job creation projects over tactics aimed at boosting consumer spending, his top economic adviser said Sunday.
With the United States facing gloomy forecasts of as much as 10 percent unemployment and a deepening recession in 2009, Lawrence Summers said creating three million new jobs was a "key pillar" of Obama's plan.
"When President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he will face what may well be the bleakest economic outlook since World War II," Summers, who will head the National Economic Council, wrote in an editorial in The Washington Post.
"As difficult as these conditions are, however, the Obama administration also inherits an economy with great potential for the medium and long terms," he wrote.
"Any sound economic strategy in the current context must be directed at both creating the jobs that Americans need and doing the work that our economy requires."
Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under former president Bill Clinton, signaled that Obama would take a different track than President George W. Bush.
"Some argue that instead of attempting to both create jobs and invest in our long-run growth, we should focus exclusively on short-term policies that generate consumer spending," Summers said.
"But that approach led to some of the challenges we face today -- and it is that approach that we must reject if we are going to strengthen our middle class and our economy over the long run."
Around 80 percent of the three million new jobs Obama aims to create will be "in the private sector, including emerging sectors such as environmental technology," Summers said, calling it a "bold goal."
Obama's plan would also include "not new public works, but rather, investments that will work for the American public," he said, recalling plans to modernize classrooms and revive energy efficiency initiatives.
"Failure to create enough jobs in the short term would put the prospect of recovery at risk," Summers added.
"Failure to start undertaking necessary long-term investments would endanger the foundation of our recovery and, ultimately, our children's prosperity."
Obama's incoming administration has yet to finalize a figure for the huge economic stimulus plan set for rapid adoption in the New Year, but vice president-elect Joseph Biden said last week: "We're getting awful close."
The Obama stimulus plan was originally intended to safeguard 2.5 million jobs in the next couple of years. But its scope was expanded to three million jobs earlier this month as the US economy sank deeper into recession.
Biden reaffirmed that Obama wants the new Democratic-led Congress to make the economic package its top priority when it convenes in early January, calling it "the most urgent order of business for the new administration."
Obama is to take office on January 20.