Obama Needs a Full-Employment Policy
The new unemployment figures are a stinging indictment of the Obama economic policy.
Standing now at 10.2 percent, the highest in 26 years, the rate is much worse than Obama’s advisers predicted.
And their song is getting tiresome.
They keep singing that the economy would be much worse off without the $700 billion stimulus.
But that’s no solace to the more than 15 million people who are out of work today.
You can’t tell a guy who got laid off that it could have been much worse for him? What are you going to say: You could have been doubly laid off?
You can’t tell someone who just lost her home that it could have been much worse for her.
It already is much worse for her.
And to keep saying that we’re saving or creating 3.5 million jobs, as the Administration contends, is no solace either when so many more people are out of work.
Until Obama makes a commitment to a full-employment recovery package, he’s failing to meet the crisis at hand.
Several of the best progressive economists in the country—including Dean Baker, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz—warned Obama that he was coming in way too low with his original stimulus package. They predicted that unemployment would surpass 10 percent. Obama ignored them, and now he and his advisers claim that no one could have predicted it would be this bad.
Wrong.
It’s poor economics and poor morals to design a recovery package that leaves so many people unemployed.
And it’s suicidal politics.
With unemployment this high, the voters are likely to take more revenge on the Democrats a year from now.
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Comments
Perhaps, in this age of modern mumbo-jumbo, house-of-cards economics, my suggestion might seem ridiculously naive...but here goes, anyway.
Infrastructure.
Our entire infrastructure, from highways, to bridges, to dams, to underground sewer & water, to waste & water treatment facilities, to our entire power grid (and so forth & so on) is borderline obsolete.
The amount of work waiting to be done is truly staggering.
Now, undertaking a complete, 110% overhaul of this system wouldn't merely create jobs for construction workers...the ripple effect in the job pool would be extremely far-reaching.
We'd have to hire not only the actual workers, but also armies of engineers, inspectors, architects, planners, draftsmen, const. material suppliers & manufacturors, fleets of heavy equipment & other vehicles, accountants, managers, secretaries, liasons, mountains of computing equipment...the list goes on & on & on.
And the vast majority of these jobs will be well-paying, solid jobs, with the added bonus of those jobs creating even more jobs outside of the const. industry. Millions of jobs would be created.
And studies have shown that for every dollar we, as a nation, invest in updating our infrastructure, we are rewarded with a return of around $1.75 going into our overall economy.
So why is this not happening in any meaningful way?!