The double-digit jobs disaster

[IndianaGreen]

The double-digit jobs disaster

There's plenty of money for more economic stimulus--if Barack Obama would fight for it.

November 18, 2009

A YEAR late and a trillion dollars short, Barack Obama is calling a jobs summit next month to try to come to grips with rising unemployment.

Jobs should have been at the top of Obama's agenda even before he took office. It didn't take a Ph.D. in economics to realize that the financial panic of 2008 was going to result in a big--and long-term--rise in unemployment.

But Obama rushed to aid bankers first, putting the government on the hook for as much as $11.6 trillion in bailouts and loan guarantees. After Wall Street came the Pentagon, which got $663.8 billion for fiscal 2010 to fund two wars and more high-tech weaponry that can already destroy the world several times over.

Obama's $787 stimulus package passed early this year was touted as a means to save or create jobs. But even the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, wanted stimulus spending of at least twice as much, according to the New Yorker magazine.

Plus, to appease Republicans, the stimulus plan included hundreds of billions in tax cuts, rather than direct job-creation measures, and gave only limited aid to state governments that have slashed jobs in the wake of falling tax revenues. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the state budget cuts will drain $470 billion out of the economy between 2010 and 2012, effectively cutting the stimulus in half.

It was only after the national jobless rate surged to 10.2 percent last month--and the number of workers underemployed or forced out of the labor market to 17.5 percent--that Obama felt the pressure to give job creation the political spotlight. But after two years of slump, the enormous suffering that occurs in every recession has turned into a full-fledged catastrophe for tens of millions of people.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/11/18/double-digit-jobs-disaster

[Ozymanithrax]

1. I support a FDR style WPA program, because lowering taxes...

would be disastrous right now and will not get the job done.

But with a strident cowardly minority who see a socialist in every pot, that won't happen.

[Skittles]

2. it's like we the people are an afterthought