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Jan Schakowsky Announces New Budget Plan With Focus On Jobs
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, announced on Wednesday that she will introduce a progressive-minded budget outline aimed at putting more than two million people to work.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, announced on Wednesday that she will introduce a progressive-minded budget outline aimed at putting more than two million people to work. Titled the “Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act,” the plan would cost $227 billion and would be implemented over two years. It would be financed by separate legislation introduced by Schakowsky called the "Fairness in Taxation Act," which would raise taxes for Americans who earn more than $1 million and $1 billion. It would also eliminate subsidies for big oil companies while closing loopholes for corporations that send American jobs overseas.
The congresswoman said that her plan would create 2.2 million jobs and decrease the unemployment rate by 1.3 percent.
"If we want to create jobs, then create jobs," Schakowsky said in a press release. "I’m not talking about "incentivizing" companies in the hopes they’ll hire someone, or cutting taxes for the so-called job creators who have done nothing of the sort. My plan creates actual new jobs."
Schakowsky’s proposal reads more like a progressive wishlist than legislation likely to be signed into law. But it does provide a template of sorts to help Democrats frame their budget argument as lawmakers enter the high-stakes super committee negotiations.
Under her plan, the following policies would be implemented:
- The School Improvement Corps would create 400,000 construction and 250,000 maintenance jobs by funding positions created by public school districts to do needed school rehabilitation improvements.
- The Park Improvement Corps would create 100,000 jobs for youth between the ages of 16 and 25 through new funding to the Department of the Interior and the USDA Forest Service’s Public Lands Corps Act. Young people would work on conservation projects on public lands including the restoration and rehabilitation of natural, cultural, and historic resources.
- The Student Jobs Corps would create 250,000 more part-time work study jobs for eligible college students through new funding for the Federal Work Study Program.
- The Neighborhood Heroes Corps would hire 300,000 new teachers, 40,000 new police officers and 12,000 new firefighters.
- The Health Corps would hire at least 40,000 health care providers, including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and health care workers to expand access in underserved rural and urban areas.
- The Child Care Corps would create 100,000 jobs in early childhood care and education through additional funding for Early Head Start.
- The Community Corps would hire 750,000 individuals to do needed work in communities, including housing rehab, weatherization, recycling, and rural conservation.
In addition, the bill would give priority to the longterm unemployed -- the so-called "99ers" who have exhausted both their state and federal unemployment benefits. Federally extended unemployment benefits are set to expire this year, even though nearly 14 million Americans remain out of work and it takes the average worker nine months to find a new job.
“The worst deficit this country faces isn’t the budget deficit," Schakowsky said. "It’s the jobs deficit. We need to get our people and our economy moving again.”
43 Comments so far
Show AllSounds like the WPA of the 1930s.
But smaller.
This is a wonderful proposal by a true progressive. Unfortunately, the reporter's overt bias ("Schakowsky’s proposal reads more like a progressive wishlist than legislation likely to be signed into law.') is probably correct.
Nevertheless, it's something concrete that should be cited over and over as sensible and practical legislation. Who could dispute its logic? Democratic legislators who resist should be hounded with the plan's details and shamed into supporting it.
"Schakowsky’s proposal reads more like a progressive wishlist than legislation likely to be signed into law.'
Sounds like we're defeating it already...We the people need to make ourselves heard and seen.
This can help avoid a"London Burning" scenario by employing and giving opportunity to young folks.
It's said when Progressive's humane, common sense proposals are called extreme and given the moral equivalency of the Tea/Oligarch Party.
Exactly. Then again, the report was from Huffington Post, so....
"Diana"
You are mistaken. This is a sham.
1. You cannot be a "true progressive" and be a member of a corporate-dependent party.
2. "Concrete"?
This is actually a shiny distraction by a member of a corporate club meant to keep people from rejecting the corruption.
3. The only "should" here is that people should reject the democrats and their co-conspirator republicans and tell them both that acceptance of corporate money for their campaigns and jobs is not tolerable and will not be tolerated.
4. The so-called "Progressive democrats" are merely a tool by which real progress is sabotaged. Their proposals have no clout in the party or in Washington, but they help stop people from organizing a real progressive party and they deliberately support sabotaging the Green Party and/or any independents like Nader (and then they will blame the Greens and Nader for hindering the democrats malfeasances wherein the democrats bring the right-wing agenda into being).
Yes, I'm well aware of the record of the progressive democrats. But I'll take this excellent proposal on its own merits and refuse to dismiss it out of hand.
Of course it's likely to fail...just like recalls or strikes or marches to the white house. Just do what's right, support what's right--and have no expectations.
You're certainly 'on to it' Birdbrain Alley.
You can never have anything that even resembles fair and democratic government while your politicians, (either local, state or federal) are elected through Corporate power, money and sponsorship. Neither can you have justice in your legal system, for the same reasons.
Don't know how you can facilitate a change to this system, but that's what needed for any worthwhile fairness to come into your society.
The Progressive Caucus needs to develop some teeth and claws. A frontal attack on conservatives, the perpetrators of all bad deeds, is long overdue.
Too bad the masses will NEVER hear of this plan. Unless enough members of the Progressive and Black Caucuses bolted the zombie Dimcrap Party and called for union rank & file to join them to build the nucleus of a new populist progressive national movement or Third Party--thus drawing corporate mass media attention to this budget proposal as a central part of their platform.
This plan is being trotted out for the consumption of left-leaning liberals who aren't as rich as the upper-middle-class pwogs who cling to the Party no matter how necrotic it is like flies on a gangrenous jackass. Tactically it is the inverse equivalent of a Tea Partier from inside the GOP trotting out a plan for far-right leaning Republican consumption to inter all homeless people in open air concentration camps to be used as forced prison labor.
If what you believe is correct, since there is no third party but the tea party with an ounce of power, and nothing on the horizon, you might be given the choice to vote for more jobs for the unemployed, or concentration camps and forced labor.
Who has the power and money to stop what you believe?
Jus askin
What is it you think I believe here? I was using a logical inversion of a bad tactic to show that it is bad for both sides of the dominant political equation to engage in that type of tactic.
As I've stated in many posts, U.S. labor unions and their family members united have more than enough numbers and grass roots money to build the core of a powerful national populist progressive movement. It's just a matter of their rank & file realizing their potential power and the urgent need for national labor solidarity and then deposing union leaders who are still trying to chain them to the failed Dim Party so they can replace them with more militant solidarity/activist labor leaders.
Schkowsky's plan is far too sensible to ever see the light of day, just like the previous progressive caucus budget. Anything that makes sense and doesn't sufficiently inflame the yokels is doomed. Ignorance and gullibility is killing this country.
"My plan creates actual new jobs."
~♥~
well, the cynical author does at least credit her plans as a good place to begin discussion. one job-creating idea for the construction field to repair crumbling public schools might give the economy a booster shot, but if we don't put our minds together and repair the failing and crumbling education system the core problem still remains. closing loopholes and eliminating government subsidies for big oil, cannot stop the mindless consumption of pretty much the last drops of unrenewable precious resources. money, alone, cannot solve the problems created from decades of neglect while we all watched the paper chase and left the support sytem unattended. the american dream that we can continuously grow bigger ever bigger and ever richer ever richer on a finite orb has turned into a nightmare. we need to figure a new dream, one that work! her suggestions sound like shortcuts back to an unsustainable consumptive life-style.
we're spinning our wheels arguing about money as if it were life's most important goal; it's just a tool. true progress requires a realalistic goal, a sensable and achievable goal; nor a child'd fantasy dream. there's already plenty of work needs done. the earth needs our help, but most of that work won't pay the big buck at first. i bet the long term the payoff will be great.
OMG! There is at least one voice of reason in Congress. Congratulations to Ms. Schakowsky for introducing a sensible piece of legislation that at least begins to attack the real problems of our economy: joblessness and inequality.
However, I admit the chances of its going anywhere are zilch because of Republicans and democrats who have accepted the austerity nonsense.
Jim Shea
I applaud Rep. Schakowski's plan and hope it will be widely read and supported.
The closing of the tax loopholes and stopping subsidies make sense.
The make work program not so much. So 2.2 million people are gonna start painting houses and fixing pot holes. That should not take too long. What about after that? Cuz once that get into a Union they gonna be pretty hard to lay off...
Also, the $227B over two years and $2.2MM workers comes to $51k per worker, which is pretty decent. where does the money come to fund raw materials for all the work?
Go read some history on Keyne's "virtuous cycle," FDR's alphabet soup agencies, particularly jobs programs like the CCC that employed conservation workers, the farmers who fed them and drivers and equipment manufacturers who transported and equipped them; the tax rates on the richest 1% from 1946 to 1966; the percentage of unionized workers relative to the total number of workers over that same period; the original GI Bill as a catalyst for small and medium-sized job-creating business growth, and the recent Michael Spence/Sundile Hlatshwayo study on "free trade's" negative jobs impact inside the U.S. and quit trying to make informed people keep doing your homework for you while you endlessly regurgitate your ignorance and sociopathic, amoral gibberish on CD.
I agree with you in re "chameleon".
Also, you have the coolest posts! Always craziness going on. ;)
Now remind me, didn't Jeffords leave his original party designation after he was sworn into Congress? If Ms. Schakowsky and Dennis K. and Barbara Lee and Grivalja and other so called Progressive Democrats were more serious about the Progressive portion of their name, they would desert the Democrats in mass. Yes, even at the risk of committee assignments and everything else. Otherwise, I will be consigning them to the same file Birdbrain Alley does, shill decoys and gate keepers. Sorry, I calls them as I sees them.
Liberals, progressives and un-reconstructed socialists of all stripes in the U.S. and UK still don't get the scale of social and political organizational reform that is urgently needed here and in Britain--especially in light of the recent chaotic riots in England that played right into the hands of the ruling neo-liberals there. This reform must include the education of younger generations on the core fact that the struggle between the classes is always a POLITICAL struggle and it can either be a dumb, petty-minded, disorganized and easily criticized & smashed struggle or a smart, well-argued, effectively organized struggle built to last as a true bulwark against neo-liberal/neo-conservative fascism.
The way things are going in states like California, Michigan, Nevada and elsewhere we may soon see similarly inchoate rebellions that are easily smashed inside the U.S. The neo-lib/neo-con "leadership" of our political class has no plan to change their present Super Cat Food Commission glide-path to a Super Banana Republic (SBR). That SBR will have to be increasingly authoritarian and reliant on prison labor to maintain its over-concentrated plutocracy against the massive growing swarms of poor people who will soon realize with "market certainty" that they and their children won't ever be able to crawl up out of the under-class and lower-class their entire lives.
Hannah Sell of the UK Socialist Party has the most to say to American populist progressives and socialists on the British riots of any article I read on CD today, but even she doesn't take into account the dumbing down of public education and infotainment media in Britain and it's effect in producing younger generations from poor neighborhoods who are only capable of inchoate rebellion immediately recapitulated into infantile grasping at capitalist bling.
She also, like many theoretically un-reconstructed socialists and progressives in First World nations, perilously ignores economic globalization's offshoring of middle-class jobs, tax revenues, GDP and consumer spending ability to create economically and environmentally unsustainable mega-middle-classes in densely over-populated "developing" countries like China and India.
None of the articles I've read on this subject talk about the intensification of competition for jobs created by regional over-populations and massive shifting floods of immigration leaving behind over-exploited or entirely neglected and deeply poor Third World countries in desperate searches for work in the global neo-liberal race to the bottom in wages, working conditions and environmental devastation.
Hannah of the UK Socialist Party says:
"...while the riots have received huge media coverage, they are allowing the capitalist media and the government to further demonise young people, and to potentially divide the struggle against the government.,,However, the government can only be defeated by building a mass, united movement of all those under attack from it. The organised working class in the trade unions have the key role to play."
She correctly assesses that these chaotic, politically organizationally uninformed riots played right into the hands of neo-liberal fascists--not just in the UK but everywhere neo-liberals rule in the world--providing plenty of fresh & frightening video footage that they can resort to to justify harsh crack-downs on chaotic uprisings and more punishing budget cuts on poor young people.
The American Right and far-Right will hammer these riots endlessly as excuses for preemptive, reactionary and continual repression of the poor inside the US who DARE show any resistance in numbers to any fascist contraction of the economy and crumbling civil liberties that many of them are already barely clinging to by their fingernails to survive as poverty itself is increasingly criminalized here.
She also correctly assesses the key role that organized labor MUST play in building a mass solidarity movement to resist neo-liberal laissez-faire capitalism. This is equally true in America where "organized" labor has only barely begun to wake up at the rank & file level and most of the labor "leaders" are fat, lazy, overpaid hacks co-opted by the corporate liberal establishment.
In fact, this entire situation in the UK and US is the direct fault of 30 years of corporatist, militarist co-opting of "leftists" into corporate "mainstream" liberalism of, by and for upper-middle-class liberals that buys into neo-liberalism's "free trade" assault on precisely the jobs that serve as class upward mobility ladders from the lower-class to the middle-class in ALL First World countries now.
Well meaning but constipated and imaginationally stunted liberal activist mush about "paying more attention" to these poor communities and their youth by griping about the "attack on social welfare...to demand equitable opportunities for education and jobs" that doesn't take into account the neo-liberal hurdle of "free trade" to creating good paying middle-class jobs in First World nations is full of angry murmuring and ire and signifies NOTHING. There are no large and well organized national movements or political parties that represent the working-class and poor in either country, let alone ANY progressive or liberal activist group of any kind who has thought through the real economic and environmental consequences of 16 years of economic globalization.
This is because the liberals and pwogwessives of the upper-middle-class in both the UK and US, who make up the bulk of the actual Labour and Democratic party membership and patronage, respectively, have grown too dependent on "free trade" stock dividends generated by foreign labor at the direct expense of domestic good paying jobs. They are in denial of the fact that globalization is now taking larger and larger bites out of the upper-middle-class in fields that require advanced degrees in science, high-tech management, engineering and computer science.
The political struggle of the working-class that ignores the economically attritive "free trade" regime, Third World over-population vs. First World and "developing world" [especially: China's and India's] resource consumption pressures is doomed to serial failure from the outset.
"FREE TRADE" MUST BE RE-NEGOTIATED TO INCLUDE GLOBALLY ENFORCEABLE LABOR AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS, OR SLOWLY PHASED OUT, AGRICULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL SECTOR-BY-SECTOR OVER A 15 YEAR PERIOD IF THERE ARE EVER GOING TO BE ENOUGH GOOD PAYING JOBS TO SERVE AS LADDERS UP FROM THE LOWER-CLASS TO THE MIDDLE-CLASS IN THE UK, EU OR US.
People who try to better educate or organize the young people most afflicted by all this need to teach them more than just "readin' writin' and 'rythmatic" and a smattering of post-WWII history. They need to teach them who their real enemies are and the globalized scale of the top-down class warfare that targets them for economic and social exclusion and the destruction of their (and really all of our) futures.
It's window dressing. Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see. Washington is thoroughly corrupt and nothing good can come from corruption. Hope lies elsewhere.
Yeah - it's amazing how jubilant everyone gets over the words, instead of waiting for the actions.
Whether this is meant to placate the "liberal / progressive" base or not is immaterial. Read through the proposal and see if you agree with my assessment that this is deeply flawed.
I think that we first we should start with the premise that with official unemployment at 9% real unemployment is double or more and that this unemployment is very unevenly distributed with manufacturing, construction and trades, and other traditional blue collar workers being those hardest hit.
So why do I say that this is deeply flawed? I'll take each of the following in turn.
"The Park Improvement Corps would create 100,000 jobs for youth between the ages of 16 and 25 through new funding to the Department of the Interior and the USDA Forest Service’s Public Lands Corps Act. Young people would work on conservation projects on public lands including the restoration and rehabilitation of natural, cultural, and historic resources."
I don't have any real objection to this one other than with adult unemployment hovering around 20% and in some areas higher, why we are concerned with creating jobs for 16 and 17 year olds?
"The Student Jobs Corps would create 250,000 more part-time work study jobs for eligible college students through new funding for the Federal Work Study Program."
Same here, I like the idea and its one which we should do, but if this is supposed to be a jobs bill then why are we including this?
"The Neighborhood Heroes Corps would hire 300,000 new teachers, 40,000 new police officers and 12,000 new firefighters."
None of these will be "new" jobs. At best all this one will do is to rehire some of those who were already laid off due to the massive state and local budget cuts. If that's the goal, then fine, but lets at least say so. Another problem with this is one we've always faced with these types of "targeted" community hiring programs - they aren't sustainable. Once the federal dollars run out one MUST assume that the local governments can sustain the annual salaries of these municipal workers. Something we all know just isn't true.
"The Health Corps would hire at least 40,000 health care providers, including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and health care workers to expand access in under served rural and urban areas."
"The Child Care Corps would create 100,000 jobs in early childhood care and education through additional funding for Early Head Start."
Again, both of these are good ideas and ones I wouldn't mind seeing implemented. Just not in a jobs bill that is supposed to put the nation back to work. MD's, MA's, PA's, and RN's aren't the ones who have been hard hit with this economic meltdown and those of them that have been are really nothing more than collateral damage - as people no longer have the funds to access health care the health care workers are seeing the economic effects.
Head Start is a great program and should be expanded, I just don't think that a jobs bill is the place to do it.
The teaching, public safety, medical professionals, and the head start jobs all require college degrees or specialized training, in fact many of the medical ones cited require much more than a bachelors degree. These are not "off the shelf" jobs that a jobs bill in an era of 20% unemployment should be trying to create. And we shouldn't be talking about 2 years either. This nation's unemployed can't possibly wait 2 years for relief!
What she calls the School, Park, and Community Improvement Corps are where the real job creators in this proposal lie. These are jobs that need doing nation wide, many of which require very little training so that many current unemployed could do them, and are so badly needed. If we coupled those jobs with putting massive amounts of money into doing the maintenance, repair, and upgrading of our nation's public infrastructure such as our municipal water systems, levies and dams, storm water systems, sewer systems, and the like then we could easily solve this unemployment problem.
If we're going to spend a quarter trillion or so to create jobs then we need to ensure that we actually create jobs that will immediately put our unemployed back to work. Sadly this proposal doesn't do this. The time frame is too long and many of the jobs require specialized training.
Thank you for taking the time to examine these proposals one-by-one KrazyKatz- saved me the time. ;)
All I would add is that reinstatement of some tariffs/revocation of some trade deals along with high taxes on top incomes and reinstatement of laws preventing capital flight would also be needed to help a public works job creation program on the private sector side.
That would be the New Deal way at least.
In the "Global Economy" the only way out I see is a "Green Jobs Recovery". This would entail massive public works infrastructure projects for the quick, low-skill jobs now, regulation of the economy to incentivize domestic manufacture and service enterprises related to the new infrastructure for the quality blue- and white-collar jobs ASAP, and Cold War or near-Cold War investment in research and technology (on Green tech, dropping the Empire-building) for the high-paying and professional jobs of tomorrow.
It is very interesting to see the lack of interest on the part of the Government, Congress, and Big Money Boys in such a proposal. I mean, there is a lot of stinkin' money in it, but they refuse to see that, don't they?
matti,
And don't forget a financial transactions tax on stock, bond, and other financial instrument trades which will not only bring in much needed revenue but start to reign in this unwarranted speculation in the financial market and would at least be a start in the definancialization of our economy.
...but wouldn't be the total shift away from Globalization that a real return to the straight New Deal would be.
Agreed.
We get it, why don't they? ;)
Revocation of "free trade" deals could not happen at too sudden a pace. It would massively shock both the domestic and global economy. Those trade deals affect many different agricultural and industrial sectors of the global economy and related natural resource & labor distributions in very complex ways now. They would have to be slowly phased out, sector-by-sector, over as many years as it's taken them to get us into this domestic job creation dead zone. As each sector is freed from the treaty regime there should be a Keynesian analysis of the domestic and global effects of the last 16 years of "free trade" on that sector to see how much of it can be rebuilt inside the U.S. with temporary subsidies of various kinds to help do so.
The price of gas has dropped to the point where the poor can afford Molotov cocktails ...Unfortunately, most burning occurs in the poorest neighborhoods.
Are you suggesting it would be good to burn neighborhoods that aren't poor?
I hope that "jobs" isn't code word for "no taxes on the job creators", otherwise it's a devil's deal.
GoingGreen,
I haven't seen the actual legislative text yet but from the description both here and elsewhere it looks like these are going to be essentially government jobs and not another handout of money to private enterprise in the hopes they actually create jobs.
While I obviously don't agree with the specifics of what what type of jobs to target for reducing our massive unemployment I do think that this could be a wonderful vehicle for getting the progressive caucus to fashion something that actually stands a chance of drastically reducing the nation's unemployment.
Of course, unless the progressive caucus is actually willing to fight not just the Republicans and their backers which is expected but their own party, including the current occupant of the White House its all for show. And I mean actually fight. Publicly and vocally challenge the party leadership for their very leadership positions including mounting an active primary challenge to Obama.
Black please
But all of these jobs appear to be government jobs in one way or another, and therefore constitute an additional burden on the taxpayers. This is no way to grow the economy.
I would agree with you except we've tried the alternative for the past 30 years and all its done is dig the hole and make things worse.
Our businesses are literally sitting on trillions of dollars in cash - much of it the result of both direct and indirect government outlays. They're not interested in creating jobs in this nation and in fact are quite busy doing the opposite. They're shedding both jobs and those that are left they're busy reducing salaries, benefits, and bargaining rights.
Bottom line is that the private sector system is broken. There's no easy fixes either. The two things that must be done won't be easy and will have unintended consequences. That is dismantling these free trade agreements and dismantling our overbloated financial industry. These extreme stock market gyrations we've been witnessing these past few days has been made way worse by the high speed automated trading that is designed solely to exploit the "market". We've shipped off our real source of economic security which is our manufacturing and we've replaced that with trading in pieces of paper.
Bottom line is that until we can wholesale restructure our entire economy government is going to have to play a pivotal role in ensuring people have gainful employment.
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (Associate Justice from 1916 to 1939)
To Derby Lad:
According to Forbes Magazine, the richest 400 American billionaires (out of a total of 1200 US billionaires up from about 45 billionaires in 1988) after loopholes pay an average marginal income tax rate of 17%. Hedge fund managers pay 15% because their incomes are taxed as capital gains. Both types of plutocrats pay substantially less as a percentage of their income in taxes than the maids who clean their homes, the gardeners who manicure their lawns and gardens, and the nannies who care for their children.
Eliminating billionaire tax loopholes and blocking the $300 Billion dollars in annual taxable income the Dept. of Treasury says the richest 1% illegally and legally hide offshore, and raising their marginal income tax rate to 30% without loopholes would generate enough revenues to put millions of Americans to work who could themselves be taxed at 27% and generate more government revenue and wealth redistribution throughout the economy than billionaires taxed with loopholes at less than 20% who illegally and legally hide $90 Billion dollars they owe the US government offshore every year.
To Krazy Kat:
"...government is going to have to play a pivotal role in ensuring people have gainful employment."
That's not on the US/EU neo-liberal agenda. Government should play such a role. It won't without much more massive, organized and sustained public pressure. It's coming in the EU and will probably break up the EU "free trade" zone, but I don't think Amurkans are up to it anymore. Too stupid, brainwashed, terrorized and paralyzed. I estimate four to one odds we'll see a Super Banana Republic in the U.S. between 2013 and 2015. Things are going to get a hell of a lot worse here before they get any better--if they ever do get any better.
now, two million people working can create enough money to pay back all the investment - has never happened