In his Thanksgiving holiday message, President Obama said his administration has acted by cutting taxes for nearly all working men and women and for small businesses and by extending unemployment benefits and health coverage for millions out of work. He trumpeted other administration initiatives, including the health care overhaul, before saying more needs to be done, particularly for those without jobs.

The President will meet this week with business owners, labor leaders and nonprofit officials to talk about additional efforts to spur job creation. The President’s job summit includes executives from companies like Google, Boeing, and Fedex. Businesses support tax cuts and measures to make credit more available, while the White House appears to be leaning toward shifting stimulus funds toward infrastructure projects and steps to boost clean technology jobs. On Friday, the government will release figures for job losses and the unemployment rate for November.

Congressional leaders say they would like to do more to spur job creation, yet economists and business executives warn that their plans to impose new healthcare and climate-change costs on corporations would have the opposite effect. Business groups have persistently warned about the employment consequences of the congressional proposals. Associations representing thousands of small businesses that do not offer their employees health insurance, in particular, have complained that the legislation would make it harder for them to stay in business and hire new workers.

As the President prepares to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops to the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan, a tax hike plan is being developed by Rep. David Obey that would combine higher taxes already coming with the expiration of Bush’s tax cuts at the end of 2010 and new taxes proposed in the healthcare legislation moving through Congress to pay the growing bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.