Paul Krugman: The Jobs Imperative

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/opinion/30krugman.html

If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable.

(snip)
One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can’t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by ... providing jobs. It’s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment. There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost. In a proposal to be released today, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that spending $40 billion a year for three years on public-service employment would create a million jobs, which sounds about right.

(snip)
Later this week, President Obama will hold a “jobs summit.” Most of the people I talk to are cynical about the event, and expect the administration to offer no more than symbolic gestures. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, we can create more jobs — and yes, we should.

[bertman]

1. AMEN, Brother!!! Recommend.

[doc03]

2. I heard that this morning, he does make a point

that you could make many more lower paying jobs with a WPA type project. But how long would it take before any work actually got started? They built dozens of flood control dams here in eastern Ohio back in the 30's. But today it would take 10 years of study and red tape to get one dam started then some group would come out of the woodwork to shut it down. You take the current Stimulus it is not a very cost effective job producer it produces a few temporary very high paying construction jobs. There is a company that has been trying to build an amusement park nearby and they still don't have the OK from the EPA or Corps of Engineers after over 4 years. I think they will just give up eventually, they tried to build one out west a few years ago and finally just dropped that idea.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. National Broadband Infrastructure Project needs doing.