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Jobs Crisis Needs Drastic Action
Nine months into the stimulus, with double-digit unemployment, we need a full-scale emergency relief plan.
Without jobs, people lose hope. Without hope, there is no future.
Millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year in the aftermath of the Wall Street collapse. Good jobs continue to disappear. Millions of young people leaving high school and college this year aren't finding jobs. This is the nation's No. 1 crisis, because without jobs, people lose their homes. They stop buying medicine. They go to bed hungry. They feel worthless and useless. They lose hope.
President Barack Obama started his presidency with a large-scale recovery act that has helped to slow the job loss. But nine months into the stimulus, with double-digit unemployment, we need a full-scale emergency relief plan that goes much further.
In a new study, our organizations (the Institute for Policy Studies and Jobs with Justice) have joined with the Center for Community Change and Legal Momentum to offer a bold plan to turn the country around. We suggest three main initiatives that will bring good jobs and a sense of security back to our nation for roughly $400 billion.
First, we need a public jobs program. Yes, like the jobs programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. This is vital because the private sector isn't going to step up to the plate. Corporations are cutting costs wherever they can and are squeezing more work out of the existing workforce. The government can create good new jobs for about $40,000/year per person that allow workers and their families to lead healthy, stable lives. It could create about a million new jobs for $40 billion. Most of the jobs could be for the critical "green" transition this country needs to address the climate crisis. We can put young people to work weatherizing homes, building solar panels, and building the affordable public housing we need to keep people secure.
Second, the federal government must drive money to state and local governments, whose tax base has collapsed in this crisis. They need about $270 billion to cover their projected deficits next year and to save millions more good jobs that are vital for community services.
Third, the government "safety net" programs that keep people alive in this country require a $100 billion funding boost. One in eight Americans now get food stamps. Even with that help, almost one in four American kids go to bed hungry at night. We need an outreach program to help reach the 15 million to 16 million Americans who qualify for food stamps, but have yet to sign up. We'll need roughly $60 billion more in 2010 to maintain unemployment insurance for those who have lost their jobs. An additional $20 billion to help the jobless pay for their health insurance. And, our flawed "welfare" program for "needy families" requires additional funds, even though it reaches only a fraction of those in need.
This frayed safety net needs fixing in the long run. In the short run, it needs more money.
Clearly, we can't borrow forever to pay for these programs. That's why we also propose fair tax proposals that would raise the same amount of revenue that we propose be spent with common-sense steps that place the burden of costs on those who created the crisis. For example, a small tax on the buying and selling of stocks on Wall Street could generate $150 billion and discourage the financial shenanigans that trigged the current crisis. Raising the top tax rate back to what it was when President George W. Bush took office could raise tens of billions dollars more.
The economic crisis we're in didn't fall from the heavens. It resulted from 30 years of Wall Street pressing government to free it from critical regulations. By last year, Wall Street was far removed from the responsible lending practices that helped recycle savings to small businesses and home buyers. It resembled a vast casino without rules. We need to close the casino so that financial institutions can go back to lending to the firms that should be creating the bulk of good jobs in this country.
A bold jobs plan will put people back to work. It will keep hope alive.
21 Comments so far
Show AllA Government jobs program is original sin for the oligarchs. Until their economic well being is at risk they will never consider a jobs program. That is why I encourage people to stop spending on products from national and international corporations. It is painful but we have no other option. Let's get it over with.
Today West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller proposed extending Medicare coverage to 55-64 year olds as part of the Senate Health Care Bill.
Extending Medicare would immediately create more jobs than all the jobs programs Obama has proposed.
Millions of 55-64 year olds are delaying retirement 5, 10 or 15 years solely to keep relatively affordable employer-sponsored medical insurance. Make Medicare available to them and millions of their jobs will be immediately open to unemployed Americans of all ages.
It makes perfect sense. That's why it doesn't stand a chance on Capitol Hill.
Yet another piece telling us what we 'must' do and what 'needs' to be done... without the slightest suggestion as to how such a 'plan' might ever even be considered by The Owners of The Place, Inc.
I'm coining a new genre of reporting/op-eding: the Laundry List genre. You know, when fellow choir members pen pieces offering us a Laundry List of problems/solutions we've long memorized without daring to propose a 'plan' on how to accomplish any Laundry List items.
Oh, I know - how about a Jobs Day, where we all wear cute ribbons and protest for a few hours and then wonder why 'change' hasn't magically occurred...
Good point Frank.
Stone below has provided a starter.
We need an organized public mandate and the constitution foresaw the need and allowed for it. We are legally allowed to throw out the government which is not serving us and replace it.
from the article:
"This is the nation's No. 1 crisis, because without jobs, people lose their homes."
Succinctly stated the problem, but missed the answer...
rather than provide endless work for generation after generation to pay, endlessly, for housing, and kill every living thing in the process, simply remove land and housing from ownership...share resources...work with one another, rather than against...
The nation's No. 1 crisis is that it sits atop a small ball, covered with a very thin skin of living organisms, in an otherwise vast void of nothingness, and is in the process of destroying that small, living ball...due to jobs...
Exactly.
Jobs are the problem.
With this huge confluence of global crises we are now facing, it is time to stop using band aids on a a severed carotid artery.
Obama has placed private investment as his first priority for a healthy economy, which is plainly merely serving the interests of private investors over the needs of the public at large. In fact, private investment places the biggest strain on the economy because it seeks high profits and there are no higher profits than those provided by demand-driven whirlpools in the market. When these eddies get large enough to take down the economy they are called bubbles, before that they are called hot investments. The White House strategy appears to be to allow the economy to be drawn down by the riptide until it starts blowing bubbles before a rescue is attempted.
Obama's first priority is to hand out taxpayers' money to private investors to invest in the next bubble and give him more campaign contributions since many of the workers who sent him money for the 2008 campaign are now unemployed or will be unemployed by the time the 2012 election rolls around.
Or else what will happen because I'm sure that our plutocratic legislators and our aristocratic president don't really care unless of course their own necks would be on the line. Or unless they are at least a little nervous about the prospect.
Well, we do have a couple of public jobs programs, but they involve training young people how invade other countries; I am not sure we want to expand these jobs programs, but they are being expanded anyhow. We cannot keep borrowing forever to pay for them. Right.
Its called a defacto draft (compared to a conscription draft like we had during the Viet Nam occupation) whereby enlisting in the military is the ONLY job opportunity for millions of Americans.
Triple the minimum wage to a living wage, and tax the pathological rich at confiscatory levels.
Some real-world critique...
From the article:
"The government can create good new jobs for about $40,000/year per person that allow workers and their families to lead healthy, stable lives. It could create about a million new jobs for $40 billion. Most of the jobs could be for the critical "green" transition this country needs to address the climate crisis. We can put young people to work weatherizing homes, building solar panels, and building the affordable public housing we need to keep people secure."
But the Republicans do not want this. For the past two days they have been saying NO NEW STIMULUS even though it would come from unspent or repaid TARP monies: Pay down the deficit, do not create jobs, they say. It is that clear. Wall Street "stimulus," yes; Main Street stimulus, screw 'em.
"...and building the affordable public housing we need to keep people secure."
This country has a housing glut and now coming to a neighborhood near you, a commercial real estate glut. There is an entire division of classical economics concerning "redistribution," "transfer payments," etc., that is generally avoided in today's discourse, but it exists. E.G., the so-called Tobin Tax, a tiny transactions tax on speculation.
Same principles go for the labor market. Do not lay off workers; reduce hours, as with the current German model (but of course they have "socialized medicine" so those private enterprises keeping those workers are not burdened with health insurance issues, while American employers are actually incentivized by insurance issues to lay off workers).
What we really need is a mass mobilization World War Two style. But we probably no longer know how to do it properly, no thanks to the Dept. of Homeland Security---billions there down the drain...
"We can put young people to work weatherizing homes, building solar panels,..."
This is not as simple as it sounds. For starters, most "young people" in this country are semiliterate and can't understand an instruction manual (not that they are generally well-written!). Their knowledge of physics? Can they form task teams like old barn-raisers? Can they find an honest bookkeeper to help organize the task at hand? Except in identical tract houses, every solar configuration is unique to the house, and the occupiers of the dwelling require an education. Who is out there who can organize this? Who knows how to mobilize this country to "DO THE RIGHT THING"? Maybe the only thing...
One thing seems clear to me: regardless of the outcome of the healthcare fiasco, this nation will fail if Obama keeps being blackmailed by the phalanx of the GOP. None of the programs sought by the above article can come to pass in the current dynamic. Obama needs to apologize and return to the Diaspora.
Things are not always as they seem.
-30-
"This is not as simple as it sounds. For starters, most "young people" in this country are semiliterate and can't understand an instruction manual (not that they are generally well-written!)."
Come on now, let's not exaggerate and let's not insult fine people with unfounded generalizations.
Where is the ghost of Harry Hopkins when we need him? Or Henry Wallace, dammit!
-30-
Government job program means that one day everybody will work for the government and not produce anything. It will be like the Soviet Union - a failed economic experiment.
The real issue with jobs is that the US government allowed companies to move jobs overseas and bring in cheap foreign labor into this country. This process started under Clinton with NAFTA and took only 15 years to totally change the job picture for American workers.
Wall Street crisis is a direct result of this practice - the country is not producing anything, the new "products" invented to show growth in GDP were mortgages. Thus, the bubble.
The practice is called "labor arbitrage" - locking in US prices for product and services and paying low wages to foreigners.
Go to any office park - it is full of young Indian men, all in this country on some sort of work visa. This strips people in this country of jobs, careers, any future opportunities. We lost skills as the industries had moved.
The only way to get the process reverse is to stop export of American job and importation of foreign labor into this country. It will take a while, but it is worth it.
FDR's New Deal reduced unemployment in the 30's - and the unemployment returned each time they tried to rescind it.
For half a century I have worked and studied in WPA buildings, in large part by the light of WPA-produced electricity. GM and Standard Oil bought out the cheap, efficient public transport in Los Angeles.
The US shipped jobs overseas way before NAFTA - though NAFTA surely did not help. When the US quit annexing the land it conquered, it started exporting jobs: that's what the hundreds of military bases are doing abroad. They put down populist revolt to keep wages artificially low, their wages far more surely "locked in" than those of American workers.
Quit exporting jobs? Sounds good to me, but let's not imagine that the next chimera falsely paraded as "free trade" "deregulation" or "privatisation" will produce differently than NAFTA.
"Government job program means that one day everybody will work for the government and not produce anything. It will be like the Soviet Union - a failed economic experiment."
There are some jobs that should be government jobs and not privatized ones, because the per capita cost would be less, and money would go directly into productivity. As in, the people own the profit, so profit is taken out of the equation, other than direct compensation for people supplying the work. There could be a mixture of permanent government jobs and temporary contracts with private suppliers as we have often already managed successfully. With a lower per capita cost, we are all more free.
Stimulus money up front is temporary but it should be used to set up modern and green infrastructure for the benefit of all, and rescue people in this Great Depression II. We could also as a society decide to lower our taxes as well as choose to spend them more wisely, for instance free public universities vs. bleeding money to the destructive MIC.
Unions should be allowed however bargaining needs to be fair to both unions and the public. A liberal vacation should be guaranteed to any worker public or privately employed starting in year one. Single payer health ins. and social security etc. would keep costs low and take care of all public and private. People would be free to save extra money for retirement etc. if they wish but it would be their own dimes. Salaries should be reasonable for job performed depending on skill needed or the difficulty of the labor and the work done. Bureaucracy should be kept to a minimum.
There should also be a reasonable cap on what individuals and businesses and estates can amass in wealth and property. Only those registered and taxed can do business locally. Overage returns to the whole society. This would be liberal enough to allow for a reasonable amount of well-to-do-ness for all who aspire to that. This would prevent the evil of power concentration and take care of a lot of the government and corporate corruption. People should also be free to be self-employed. Throw out the entire tax code of loopholes and start over with transparent accountability which requires like sixth grade math.
Vast tracts of forests and wilderness and parks should be preserved as commons and the public should pay to protect them, by law.
The US is a really, really insane society right now and it needs a makeover.
Only way to create job is to give stimulus money to the people. Let do lottery style 1 million dollars grant to open small business, every citizen over 18 shall be include. Give these people 3 months to open business or they loose stimulus money. IRS will oversee spending, and every new business needs place (rent own), needs equipment (only American made) and needs employees.
Just like Oklahoma land rush in 19th century, overnight economy was turn. I already wrote to president and senators and many in congress, bur no reaction. They really think that we are too stupid to create jobs. Money is only for rich guys, and we gone get what will drop from their table.