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Watch live: President Obama's Racine town hall meeting

By Fox6Now.com

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President Barack Obama is in Racine today to hold a town hall meeting on the economy.

''This is an old steel town that had 17.5% unemployment when I took over as mayor a little over a year ago," Mayor John Dickert said.

The event begins at 1:15 p.m. at Racine Memorial Hall, 72 Seventh St., for those who picked up free tickets Tuesday.

Under a town hall format, Obama is expected to deliver prepared remarks and then answer questions, the White House said.

Obama is visiting a hard-hit Midwestern industrial city at a time when the national recovery appears to be faltering, noted Robert Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-supported think tank in Washington, D.C.

''The recovery is simply too weak to absorb all the workers who have lost their jobs in this recession," Scott said.

Scott noted that a new report from Goldman Sachs predicts that unemployment will remain stuck around 9.7% through the end of 2011.

According to the latest national data, the U.S. Labor Department reported that private-sector employment slowed drastically in May, when nearly all of the 431,000 jobs added across the United States were temporary census workers hired by the government. State employment data for May showed that Wisconsin's economy continued to struggle as the state lost 7,900 private-sector jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Unemployment in Racine, like much of Wisconsin, has eased off the crisis levels reached during the worst of the recession, which began in December 2007. Still, according to the latest available data, Racine's jobless rate stood at 14.2% in May; among Wisconsin metro areas, only Beloit, at 15.8%, posted a higher rate.

Obama previously visited Racine Memorial Hall as a candidate in February 2008, an event attended by some 3,500 people.

At the time, the recession was just beginning to bite, but Racine was already accustomed to hard times. "During the 1990s and 2000s, we were watching manufacturing slowly bleed out of town," Dickert said. "We were consistently one of the highest unemployment cities of the state."

One of the biggest concerns among economists now is that Obama's 2009 stimulus program -- a plan to commit hundreds of billions of dollars toward clean-energy projects, tax incentives and public construction -- has peaked and is starting to fade before a broad-based recovery finds traction. At the same time, other advanced economies meeting over the weekend at the Group of 20 summit in Toronto signaled that they want to scale back government stimulus spending and focus on debt reduction, meaning that the international tide is turning against economic pump-priming, said Scott at the Economic Policy Institute.

''Other nations are getting more conservative, raising taxes and cutting spending," Scott said.

Obama's stimulus spending program almost certainly will be a topic, at least if Dickert gets a chance to bring it up.

Racine won a half-million-dollar energy grant under the 2009 stimulus package. According to Dickert, it used the money to buy the latest generation of energy-efficient lighting systems from Racine-based Ruud Lighting Inc. It then hired unemployed electrical workers to install them in municipal streetlights, rewiring a fifth of the city and saving $40,000 in the city's electric bill.

A spokeswoman for Ruud said the company is working with municipalities across the country, including Oakland and Los Angles, Calif., on similar lighting deals.

Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, another Washington think tank, said Obama likely wants to show empathy at a time when a record number of Americans -- 6.8 million, or 46% of all unemployed people -- have been out of work six months or longer.

''My guess is that he wants to connect with people and show that he gets it," Boushey said.

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