Reasonable, Responsible People and the Jobs Crisis

Earlier I posted a summary of the jobs proposals President Obama laid out this morning at the Brookings Institution. Here are a few, still-preliminary thoughts. Since this will be the initial defining address on one of the issues that defines the economy today and will be a massive upcoming legislative debate, it’s worth looking at from a few angles now.

Reasonable people—or, as the president might say, responsible ones—agree: We need serious action to produce jobs and to support people who have been without jobs for months. And they agree on many of the key ways to do that: The president’s address today embraced several points of the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan on jobs, and called for an extension of unemployment benefits extended under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the AFL-CIO and the National Employment Law Project have done.

Reasonable people can—and will—quibble over the details. We’ll be doing a lot of that in the coming months. But as the speech makes clear, action has been urgently needed at several points in the past year, and is needed once again. Reasonable people cannot disagree on that point—those who don’t think there’s a problem or who think that the way to solve the problem is to continue the policies that created it are not worthy of the title. The debate over the details of how to create jobs and spur economic growth needs to take place among reasonable, responsible people.