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The Human Equation
Vice President Joe Biden told us this week that the Obama administration "misread how bad the economy was" in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration.
Puh-leeze. Mr. Biden and President Obama won the election because the economy was cratering so badly there were fears we might be entering another depression. No one understood that better than the two of them. Mr. Obama tried to clean up the vice president's remarks by saying his team hadn't misread what was happening, but rather "we had incomplete information."
That doesn't hold water, either. The president has got the second coming of the best and the brightest working for him down there in Washington (think of Larry Summers as the latter-day Robert McNamara), and they're crunching numbers every which way they can. They've got more than enough data. They understand the theories and the formulas as well as anyone. But they're not coming up with the right answers because they're missing the same thing that McNamara and his fellow technocrats were missing back in the 1960s: the human equation.
The crisis staring America in its face and threatening to bring it to its knees is unemployment. Joblessness. Why it is taking so long - seemingly forever - for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me.
There are now five unemployed workers for every job opening in the U.S. The official unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, but that doesn't begin to tell the true story of the economic suffering. The roof is caving in on struggling American families that have already seen the value of their homes and retirement accounts put to the torch.
At the present rate, upwards of seven million homes can be expected to fall into foreclosure this year and next. Welfare rolls are rising, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal. The National Employment Law Project has pointed out that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers will begin losing their jobless benefits, just about the only thing keeping them above water, by the end of the summer.
Virtually all of the job growth since the start of the 21st century (which was nothing to crow about) has vanished. If you include the men and women who are now working part time but would like to work full time, and those who have become so discouraged that they've stopped actively searching for work, you'll find that 16.5 percent of Americans are jobless or underemployed. Nearly everyone who is fortunate enough to have a job has a spouse or a parent or an in-law or a close friend who is desperate for employment.
Anyone who believes that the Obama stimulus package will turn this jobs crisis around is deluded. It was too small, too weakened by tax cuts and not nearly focused enough on creating jobs. It's like trying to turn a battleship around with a canoe. Even if it were working perfectly, the stimulus would not come close to stemming the cascade of joblessness unleashed by this megarecession.
I'd like to see the president go on television and, in a dramatic demonstration of real leadership, announce a plan geared toward increasing employment that is both big and visionary - something on the scale of the Manhattan Project, or the interstate highway program or the Apollo spaceflight initiative.
My choice would be a "Rebuild America" campaign that would put men and women to work repairing, maintaining, designing and rebuilding the nation's infrastructure in the broadest sense - everything from roads and schools and the electrical power grid to innovative environmental initiatives and a sparkling new mass transportation network, including high-speed rail systems.
One of the ways of financing such an effort would be through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, which would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage additional private investment.
There was a time when Americans could think on such a scale and get it done. We used to be better than any other nation on the planet at getting things done. It would be tragic if the 21st century turns out to be the time when that extraordinary can-do spirit disappears and we're left with nothing more meaningful and exciting than lusting after tax cuts and trying to pay off credit card debt.
The joblessness the nation is experiencing is crushing any hope of a real economic recovery. With so many Americans maxed out on their credit cards and with the value of their homes deep in the tank, the only money available to spend in most cases is from paychecks. The best and the brightest in Washington may have a theory about how to get the economy booming without dealing with the employment crisis, but I'd like to see that theory work in the real world.
20 Comments so far
Show AllIn the 'real' world, when you have dictators ruling the people, and these dictators are cruel, ruthless and evil, the people (who always represent justice) rise up and overthrow.
This will happen here too, eventually.
And everyone, in their heart, knows this. Because justice is meant to prevail over injustice...it cannot be different. It is only a question of time. And lives.
nedlud July 11th, 2009 8:19 am...........May it begin.....SOONER THAN LATER!
I'm workin' on it friend. I'm still not particularly anxious to die, but better to die standing and fighting than laying down. And I guess better to be imprisoned fighting back than just letting this gradual noose of greed being tightened around OUR necks. (The WRONG necks! Ohhh, but could I get my hands on one of the right necks! Just one of them....)
As life get consecutively worse and worse each passing year (because of this dictatorship--oligarchy if you prefer), death seems increasinly ummm acceptable.
Things are getting THAT BAD around here.
And that is really really sad.
For someone like me who has loved and lived life so.
nedlud July 11th, 2009 10:32 am.............WE need more folks with your kind of passion. Remember that old bumper sticker...."If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention." Well, I'm outraged, paying attention and have started to sit on the edge of my chair. As if Bush was not enough for eight years. Now, we have a liar a thousand times more accomplished than Bush who has mesmerized a huge percentage of the population through the complicity of the MSM. As if the false flag of the atrocity of 9/11 was not enough. And now we have the Obamassiah who is actually trying to convince We the People that JUSTICE lives in the past and that we must look forward and past the crimes committed in the last eight years. Wouldn't some poor slob that got caught toking love to hear that when "Bruce" comes a knockin' on his cell door.
Bob Herbert?
Will you run for President, next time?
I don't even know who the hell you are, but we need a change.
Awww, fuck it, 3 1/2 more years of this and it will be TOO LATE.
Why it is taking so long - seemingly forever - for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me.
It shouldn't be beyond you, Mr. Herbert. You know as well as anyone that Obimbo and Joe Bitters, along with the vipers they have working for them, are protecting the Lloyd Blankfeins of this nation. The rest of us can go to Hell, if we haven't already.
Yes, Mr. Herbert appears a bit naive or engaging in blind wishful thinking.
Memo to Mr. Herbert:
Our government is one entire corporate-criminal enterprise.
If you haven't figured this out yet you haven't been paying attention.
good point: this has not yet dawned on him yet, like many professional ivory tower writers, he apparently can't see the forrest for the trees.
Oh, I think he knows. He just wants to keep his job. It's the same line as Krugman with his "speak to the American people like adults" blather. Who knows? Maybe both of them had fiery pieces that were emasculated by their editors. The editors are probably some of the lowest scum on this planet.
The last time the US did something impressive (Apollo missions), it had virtually no debt, had not yet peaked in oil production, had a huge industrial base, and rising wages. None of these essentials are in place now, so though Herbert's heart is in the right place, his prescription cannot be implemented. The only possible fix is to confiscate the stolen wealth from the mega-banks, give people back their homes, and completely rethink our way of life.
Is this going to happen? I still have yet to see a pig fly.
As I recall, it was Senator John McCain who stated that the economy was 'basicly sound' - all sound maybe?
The Rebuild America campaign sounds good. However, so did the climate change initiative recently passed. There's something very wrong going on in Washington that makes it likely that any Rebuild America campaign would be similarly sidetracked. I believe it is insufficient to JUST Rebuild America. We need to tax the cr*p out of America to pay for Rebuilding America. FDR did this: take money from the robber barons who dumped America, take it forceably, and spend it rebuilding the country they just tore apart. The wealthy have benefited greatly, since Reagan, by American industry. Their response to that generosity? Farmed out jobs, immigrant hiring, hollowed out industry, flat wages, rampant gambling, and massive debt. And yet, despite this, what's worse is that the wealthy have used their massive increased monetary power to basically take over our democracy. Thirty years after the Reagan tax cuts, the wealthy, acting through the corporations they own, OWN our government. In this capacity, they are capable of enacting legislation that pays lip service to Rebuilding America but actually lines their pockets with yet more government dollars.
Well, the heck with that.
Obama needs to step up to the plate and EMBRACE the Keynesian medicine that is so desperately needed. Don't just Rebuild America. Bust up wealthy America (as FDR did, not the whole way, of course). Until we do, our government will continue to sell the rest of us out. There's just TOO much money coming from TOO few directions for them NOT to.
Fewer plastic surgeries, gold-plated Hummers, third yachts and presidential candidates who literally can't recall how many homes they own,
and more alternative energy, mass transit, public parks and fountains, libraries, and holidays.
I guess what bothers me about this article is Herbert is calling for the latter but not the former. I frankly don't think you can afford the latter without the former.
"I frankly don't think you can afford the latter without the former."
Agreed. The former is indispensable. Without a weighting of about 10 to one (former vs later) nothing good will come of this. BH is unwittingly (I hope) providing another eupemism for the crooks in congress to latch onto like all the other PR crap (patriot act, clean air, blue skies, etc.) coming from the cesspool.
"Rebuild America", indeed.
"Why it is taking so long - seemingly forever - for our government officials to recognize the scope of this crisis and confront it directly is beyond me."
Because, BH, as you said, 'our' best/brightest government officials know the real truth: this time, there is no solution to the unemployment situation.
The "Rebuild America" idea is fine, but barely a drop in the bucket - plus, the vast majority of those jobs require skills (and a hard-work ethic) mostly non-existent in Gens X+Next, and all are short-term and spread about the country.
Bottom line: the world needs stuff. Either you make stuff and sell it at a profit, or you got nothing. We got nothing, and there is no way any government official will ever admit that...
I take great exception to your claim that the Gen Xers and beyond are the root cause of all this due a supposed lack of work-ethic. NEWSFLASH: As far a the population goes the young are disproportionately affected by the economic crisis. In fact if you have less than 5 years out of college most employers won't even speak to you. Nevermind we were the generation that grew up multi-tasking between school, sports, friends, and community involvement. As adults we can handle many tasks very fast and very efficiently. The fact that most of us excelled in school and beyond does not matter - we still lost our jobs or cannot even get a first job.
I have a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (was Dean's List and Honor Roll in college), numerous certifications, and about five years of professional experience plus the benefit of being exposed to computers from a young age. In spite of all this I have been looking since March of this year when I was let go from my job without warning. Keep the generational bull**** out of this. It has positively zero to do with anything. Also, I would say you have it backwards. The world has discovered it doesn't need so much materialistic crud. Why else do think the advertisers have been in a panic because they STILL HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS TO BE GOOD LITTLE CONSUMERS. No more consumers like past decades means one thing -- the death of consumerism (ie - the concept that an ever-expanding consumption of goods is advantageous to the economy). In other words things must change - preferably from jobs merely to produce tons of meaningless crud to services, goods, and ideas that benefit the whole of humanity. There are vast inequities still so let's get those addressed before pushing consumerism as some sort of market ideal. Let's be honest here - consumerism is not sustainable. Not with a burgeoning global population. Not with resources unevenly distributed. Not with uneven distributions of technology. Not with a climate that is threatening to wipe out 1/6th of the human race (UN: World hunger reaches 1 billion mark - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iOVOJrAbfKGbFx_EpjIORH3QAU0AD98TTT882). Even to this day the 18 - 35 crowd is relatively immune to advertising because we grew up in a world of media saturation. We woke up from the media control. It is high time the rest of you do the same.
I appreciate Bob Herbert an agree with him about rebuilding the infrastructure to create jobs. I worry that maybe because of economic segregation, many people who have not felt the sting of the tough times yet, do not understand the pain and terror so many Americans are going through. Although in the last, at least 20 years , I have worried that the poor in America have been so much worse off than ever before. Has America become an underveloped nation, without laws for the ruling class, no protection for the workers and where the poor must beg for food and other vital necessities from church pantries and homeless shelters? When did we take that extreme, right wing turn into the third world? So many people think we are one of the Industrialized Developed Nations due to our hi-tech military, society but like Bob Herbert said what about" the human equation"?
What social class does Barrack Obama belong to? If he is a good boy and does what corporate America wants--he can join the club. It's always the social climbers who are the most craven, the most willing, indeed happy to sell out, to betray. Barrack, you are known by the company you keep. What regard do you think the Summers, Geithners have for the average American worker? They have contempt for them--see them as stupid, gullible and easily manipulated. Do you think they really want to help the hourly worker? All they want is to stay on top. If I were them though, I would start to worry, in the course of events Barrack and his buddies will get what's coming to him. Just wait till unemployment hits 12% and our Pres preaches the virtues of market disipline. Change is coming Barrack.
Oh, and lets mention two wars, the only viable industry left in the US - the armament industry, military bases all over the world supporting the US role as world policeman. All of this is sucking out whatever blood is left in the bodies of those in the US huge impoverished underclass which, dispite it's condition, still cant get over its sense of entitlement. Education received by the greater part of the population is totally inadequate, the system of health care is a disaster, the infrastructure is crumbling with no financial resources available to repair it. The cultural state of this nation is in full regression into a pre-nineteenth society.
And there are few politicians who will acknowledge these conditions. Unless there is a revolution within this US social system, the nation is doomed. Too bad, but that's where its headed. I'm just rephrasing what has been alluded to in the comments above.