When Congress returns from its August recess, the Senate needs to act quickly to extend the TANF Emergency Fund, a program that has already created a quarter of a million jobs for unemployed parents and youth hardest hit by this savage recession.
The Center on Budget and Policy Prioritiesreports:
An emergency jobs program through which 37 states have provided subsidized jobs for nearly 250,000 otherwise unemployed parents and youth — helping families, businesses, and communities across America weather the recession — will end September 30 unless the Senate joins the House in voting to extend it.
The TANF Emergency Fund, which President Obama and Congress created in last year’s Recovery Act, has given states over $1 billion to operate subsidized jobs programs that have proved successful on multiple fronts. The fund has been a “win-win-win,” helping unemployed families find work, businesses expand capacity in a difficult economic environment, and local economies cope with the recession. Without the fund, some 120,000 young people would not have had summer jobs and some 130,000 parents would not have had jobs to provide for their families’ basic needs; they would also have lost a valuable opportunity to build skills for the future. (Appendix A lists the number of job placements by state.)
As the Emergency Fund’s September 30 expiration looms, states are ramping down their subsidized jobs programs, stopping new placements and giving notice that existing jobs will end. (While some of the subsidized positions were summer youth jobs that were slated to end in late August, most were for unemployed parents.) For example, Illinois plans to send notices shortly after Labor Day to 26,000 workers participating in Put Illinois to Work to inform them that their jobs will end on September 30. In San Francisco, where all except a few hundred subsidies will end on September 30, letters have already gone out to employers and workers.
Some states — generally with smaller subsidized jobs initiatives — will continue making some job placements after September 30 using other funding, but these programs will be significantly smaller than if Congress were to extend the Emergency Fund for another year. (The House has already voted twice to extend the fund for one year, which would cost $2.5 billion.) In short, failure to extend the fund would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and squander an opportunity to create many more jobs for parents who are desperately seeking work.
Christine Owens, Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project, said last week:
“The Emergency Fund has tremendously helped states create new employment opportunities. By reauthorizing it, even more states will have the opportunity to take advantage of millions in jobs subsidies. If Congress fails to reauthorize the Fund, those subsidies will vanish along with the job opportunities they provide. Continuing the TANF Emergency Fund is a concrete step Congress can take to create jobs, along with passage of larger-scale programs like the Local Jobs for America Act,” said Owens.
“Now is not the time to be adding to the ranks of unemployed, or cutting back on much-needed jobs,” concluded Owens. “It’s imperative that Congress reauthorize the Emergency Fund before it expires at the end of the month.”
The Coalition on Human Needs today reported that job-holders and employers who have benefited from the TANF Emergency Fund’s jobs program will be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, September 15 to deliver a letter to Congress from hundreds of businesses across the country. They will be joined by groups from Pennsylvania, California and Illinois, urging the Senate to pass an extension of the program through September 2011, a measure that the House has already passed.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
The only surefire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less. In my view, we should be moving forward on both fronts….
…concern about the deficit cannot be an excuse for leaving unemployed workers to suffer. We have tools that would bring unemployment down without worsening our long-run fiscal outlook, if we can only find the will and the wisdom to use them….
Much of her speech details the ways in which the Great Recession has differed from prior U.S. recessions, something we examined back in January in a post titled “Do You Believe in Magic?”
Romer is returning to UC Berkeley to assume her former post as a professor of economics.
She has been perhaps the clearest advocate in the administration for the benefits of fiscal stimulus and the need for additional policy action. But her departure does not necessarily signal a pull back by the White House from pursuing a bolder focus on new initiatives to boost jobs and the economy.
To the contrary, as President Obama has recently said the administration is working on “additional measures” as part of “a full-scale effort, a full-scale attack” to get jobless workers back to work and sustain a real economic recovery.
The question of who is chosen to fill the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) post may well be one of the critical components determining just how “full-scale” those “additional measures” will be.
In that context, yet another UC Berkeley economics professor comes to mind. Laura Tyson, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, and a member of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, served as the Chair of CEA from 1993 to 1995 in the Clinton administration.
But the primary reason Tyson comes to mind is her Op-Ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, titled “Why We Need a Second Stimulus”:
OUR national debate about fiscal policy has become skewed, with far too much focus on the deficit and far too little on unemployment. There is too much worry about the size of government, and too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth. By focusing on the wrong things, we are in serious danger of failing to do the right things to help the economy recover from its worst labor market crisis since the Great Depression.
The primary cause of the labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand — the same problem that bedeviled the economy in the 1930s.
In the wake of the financial shocks at the end of 2008, spending by American households and businesses plummeted, and companies responded by curbing production and shedding workers. By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent, according to a government estimate issued Friday. Clearly, the pace of recovery is far slower than what is needed to restore the millions of jobs that have been lost.
[...]
Under these circumstances, the economic case for additional government spending and tax relief is compelling.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
Two positive things can be said about today’s jobs report from the Labor Department. First, it was significantly better than the one for August 2009, and June and July 2010 were not as bad as had been previously calculated. The stock market apparently loves the report since many experts were predicting far worse.
There were 60,000 jobs created if you leave out the Census. Overall: 54,000 jobs lost, with 121,000 government layoffs, including 114,000 Census workers. Private-sector jobs created: 67,000. Unemployment rate: a rise to 9.6 percent. Unemployment plus underemployment: a rise to 16.7 percent. Number of Americans officially unemployed: 14.9 million. Number unemployed, underemployed and so in despair they’ve given up looking: perhaps 16 million. The employment-population ratio: up a tenth of a point to 58.5 percent.
During the first eight months of 2010, fewer new private-sector jobs (763,000) have been created than were lost in January 2009 alone. At the current rate of new job creation, it will be mid-2017 before as many Americans are working as was the case 32 months ago when the Great Recession began.
Nonfarm payrolls decreased by 54 thousand in August. The economy has gained 229 thousand jobs over the last year, and lost 7.6 million jobs since the recession started in December 2007.
[...]
This is another weak report, however the upwards revisions to June and July were a positive. The participation rate increased slightly – and that is good news – but the unemployment rate also increased.
First-time payments of unemployment insurance to those filing new initial state claims topped 1.7 million in the two month period of June and July, according to data made available by the Department of Labor.
That data showed approved first payments by states to newly jobless workers were 812,222 in June and 898,968 in July, the two most recent months for which statistics were available. The two-month total is 1,711,190 first-time payments to new unemployment claimants.
Because the most recent extension of federal emergency and extended benefits would only be available to those who exhaust their state-based benefits before November 30, most of those newly jobless after June 1 will only be eligible for 26 weeks of regular state benefits — unless an additional extension is enacted.
Under current law only 12 states, plus Puerto Rico, would continue to offer an additional 13 or 20 weeks of Extended Benefits to those who become unemployed after June 1, if their 3-month average unemployment rate is at least 6.5% or 8.0% respectively. Those states are Alaska, Connecticut, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington (New Hampshire and Vermont are currently below 6.5%).
The weekly reports of initial unemployment claims and related statistics available on the DOL website do not distinguish between actual new, first-time claims and those initial claims that are filed to renew benefits following the end of temporary jobs. But the states do provide DOL with monthly data of the new, first-time claims as well as the number of approved first-time unemployment benefit payments. And it’s that data that DOL provided, in response to a request.
The nearly 900,000 first-time payments in July were 20 percent more than those in December 2007, the official start of the Great Recession, and also more than the 837,000 in October 2009, when the overall unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent.
The chart above shows first payments for new state unemployment insurance claims, as reported monthly by the states to DOL. The data is not seasonally adjusted. I chose to start with June 2007 as it came one year after the initial collapse of the housing bubble and six months prior to the official start of the recession.
First payments on new state unemployment claims closely track the trends in overall initial claims. And they tend to follow seasonally-related patterns, even during recessions. The highest peaks tend to be in January, as retail and construction in particular reduce payrolls. The smaller, interim peaks tend to be in July. First time payments tend to decline again in August. But since overall initial claims have continued to rise during this August, the two-month rise in first payments in June and July may well continue. When August data becomes available, we’ll have an update.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
If that’s the question you’ve been asking yourself, in one form or another, over the course of the past year or two, believe me you are not alone. Whenever the subject comes up people seem to respond with that instant sense of recognition and a one word accompaniment: “Right?”
By now it’s clear that a sizable consensus of all but the most wackadoodle economists think that the stimulus measures in the original Recovery Act were far too small. As the Congressional Budget Office continues to report, those stimulus measures have had a positive impact on the economy. And without them, things would have been far, far worse. But for all of the benefits of the Recovery Act — extended unemployment insurance, COBRA health subsidies, highway and rail projects, TANF low-income-family employment programs, the largest tax cut for the middle-class in history, Medicare assistance for states and education aid for the nation’s schools — it just wasn’t big and bold enough to create the millions of new jobs needed to restore full employment.
Now, with the economic impact of the original stimulus winding down, the job market, the housing market and the economy overall are worsening again. The Republican obstructionists, especially in the Senate, have succeeded to a large extent in thwarting additional measures to boost the economy. Those measures that have passed, including a partial extension of unemployment benefits and aid to states, were substantially reduced in funding and scope even as they took months off the legislative calendar. Larger jobs bills were at least temporarily abandoned. Even a small business lending bill is stalled.
Caring not a whit that their obstruction is itself a cause of deepening misery for millions and increasing economic woes for the country, Republicans are betting that a worsening economy will work to their political benefit in November.
Unemployment remains staggeringly high. For more than a year, the monthly jobs figures have reported roughly 15 million American workers unemployed. That’s more jobless workers in our country than there were in 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, calls are mounting for additional stimulus, particularly large-scale public-funded jobs programs, amid warnings that not acting would have devastating consequences. As Paul Krugman wrote recently:
The markets aren’t demanding that we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action — about the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus,” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward.”
A number of renowned policy voices have been even more strident of late in demanding that major, long-past-due efforts directed at large-scale job creation become the singularly crucial focus.
With the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression worsening, you might expect emergency action out of Washington. But the biggest upcoming debate there is whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2 percent, or for everyone, or for no one. This is like debating whether to get a mousetrap when your home is sinking in quicksand.
We need a response proportional to the crisis.
[...]
First item on the agenda: establishing a federal bank that will provide states and locales zero-interest loans, to be repaid when their unemployment rates drop to 5 percent or below.
Second item: eliminating payroll taxes on the first $20,000 of all incomes and make up the difference by subjecting all income above $250,000 to the payroll tax. (Remember, the wealthy save most of their after-tax income, lower-income Americans spend it.)
Third item: recreating the WPA to hire Americans directly. The Works Progress Administration put Americans back to work during the Depression rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.
The jobs emergency requires no less.
And in a withering critique, titled ‘Fire and Imagination’, Bob Herbert urges the Obama administration to “re-examine what it might do to improve what is fast becoming a depressing state of affairs.”
Mr. Obama’s problem — and the nation’s — is that in the midst of the terrible economic turmoil that the country was in when he took office, he did not make full employment, meaning job creation in both the short and the long term, the nation’s absolute highest priority.
Besides responding to the nation’s greatest need, job creation would have been the one issue most likely to bolster Mr. Obama’s efforts to bring people of different political persuasions together. In the early months of 2009, with job losses soaring past a half-million a month and the country desperate for bold, creative leadership, the president had an opportunity to rally the nation behind an enormous “rebuild America” effort.
Such an effort, properly conceived, would have put millions to work overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, rebuilding our ports and transportation facilities to 21st-century standards, establishing a Manhattan Project-like quest for a brave new world of clean energy, and so on.
[...]
Think of the returns the nation reaped from its investments in the interstate highway system, the Land Grant colleges, rural electrification, the Erie and Panama canals, the transcontinental railroad, the technology that led to the Internet, the Apollo program, the G.I. bill.
The problem with the U.S. economy today, as it was during the Great Depression, is the absence of sufficient demand for goods and services. Consumers, struggling with sky-high unemployment and staggering debt loads, are tapped out. The economy cannot be made healthy again, and there is no chance of doing anything substantial about budget deficits, as long as so many millions of people are left with essentially no purchasing power. Jobs are the only real answer.
[...]
During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt explained to the public the difference between wasteful spending and sound government investments. “You cannot borrow your way out of debt,” he said, “but you can invest your way into a sounder future.”
Now, with so much money already spent and Republicans expected to gain seats in the Congressional elections, the president finds himself with a much weaker hand, even if he were inclined to play it boldly.
Perhaps he can still. In fact, he must. The ideas needed to re-employ millions of Americans are not what’s lacking. There are plenty of effective ideas, and plenty of ways to finance them as well. What is needed is the resolve to put them forward and fight for their effective implementation. And not in two years or three years. Much sooner. Like now.
In a recent speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandson, Curtis Roosevelt, described the situation facing FDR in the late summer prior to the 1934 mid-term elections during his first term, in the context of the situation facing President Obama today. The full text makes for some fascinating reading; but for our purposes here, I’ll offer some relevant excerpts.
Needless to say, looming in the background for both Presidents were and are the mid-term elections. Both — 1934 and 2010 — were and are predicted to be resounding defeats for the Democrats.
[...]
Looming over Roosevelt’s head was the Great Depression, already entrenched for several years when he became president.
During the first year and a half of FDR’s first term, as his grandson recounts, FDR’s New Deal had largely focused on addressing the banking and financial crises. And while progress had also been made to help stabilize employment in some industries, and to improve wages and working conditions for many of those workers with jobs, vast numbers of workers remained unemployed. In 1934, what we’ve come to view as the core signature programs of the New Deal — the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Social Security and unemployment insurance — were yet to be enacted. That would come a year later, in 1935.
Curtis Roosevelt continues:
Roosevelt biographer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described FDR’s dilemma during the few months before the 1934 mid-term elections. “Roosevelt, suddenly silent and irresolute, seemed to have lost his touch … The administration appeared to lack coherence both in policy and in strategy.” Schlesinger added, “these were hard days for the President. He knew that things were going badly … Roosevelt faced the organised business community [and] its determination to halt the New Deal …[He] faced the tumult of mass opinion, so ardently stirred by the radicals and demagogues … Overhanging was the threat of judicial action against New Deal laws and programs.”
The most influential historian of the day Charles A. Beard forecast doom for FDR in 1934. He wrote: “the disintegration of President Roosevelt’s prestige proceeded with staggering rapidity during February and March.”
FDR could not have felt his accustomed confidence, and was certainly not wearing his usual jaunty air. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recorded in his diary that he found his old friend “distinctly dispirited. He looked tired … and he seemed to lack the fighting vigour or the buoyancy that has always characterized him.”
Reviewing the criticisms leveled against New Deal programs was apparently instructive for the president. Roosevelt listened to his advisors suggesting one or another alternative, one option against another. And then he pondered … and pondered … taking his time, much to his aides’ frustration. “He knows nothing about economics!” was the usual charge exchanged among them.
Then, suddenly, FDR brightened and seemed to know how and where he wanted to move. His staff remained perplexed, but again Schlesinger gets it right.
“The basic reason for [FDR's] inaction was that he was simply unprepared to act … [His] inscrutable processes of decision were moving all too slowly within.” Concludes Schlesinger, “He could not lead until he knew where he wanted to go.”
My grandfather’s convoluted way of decision-making-from the stomach up to the heart, and then the head-was, as usual, right on. Later, historians would call it his natural intuition, or something like that.
[...]
In their next edition, Time magazine reported: “Franklin Roosevelt’s mood suddenly changed.” His whole legislative program was in the pot and boiling …The Social Securities Bill, the Banking bill, the Utilities Bill, the Wagner Bill, the fate of the NRA … Suddenly the irritability which had marked his recent actions dropped from him. Pronounced Time: “His ‘winter peeve’ was over.”
Yes, the New Deal was rolling again. Referring to the autumn term of Congress in 1934, just at the time of the November elections, Charles A. Beard radically changed his tune from only a few months before. “Seldom, if ever, in the long history of Congress had so many striking and vital measures been spread upon the law books in a single session.”
And the results of mid-term election of November 1934?
The Democrats increased their congressional seats in both houses, increased their governorships, and chalked up a higher proportion of the popular vote. So much for the pundits!
The Democrats’ recovery, I think, continued to be dependent upon Franklin Roosevelt’s very personal style. He seemed to sense his way through the political maze. Whatever, it remains an exceptional example of political leadership.
What FDR did in the late summer of 1934, was talk straight with and directly to the American people, fighting for expanded public job-creation programs on a scale to re-employ millions of unemployed American workers.
In his famous Fireside Chat radio broadcast of August 30, 1934, FDR said:
To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return.
[...]
I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that “The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”
I still believe in ideals. I am not for a return to that definition of Liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of Liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.
The Democrats’ predicted defeat in the 1934 mid-term elections was averted. The nation rallied to FDR’s side in the battle against unemployment — for jobs and economic recovery. The core New Deal programs that most directly benefited working Americans, both employed and unemployed, were largely enacted the following year. The WPA alone went on to employ 8 million American workers.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s impassioned statements, refusing to accept joblessness for millions of Americans, were stirring words indeed. But they were not merely words. FDR and his administration were resolved and committed to enacting big, bold New Deal plans — like the WPA — to re-employ America. And they knew that the costs of not doing so would, in fact, be far greater.
That’s the resolve that was needed in 1934; and it is needed again today.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, who is known for having a long-time bias against Social Security, sent an email to a prominent women’s rights advocate early this week, which said in part:
“I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!”
Ashley Carson, executive director of OWL, the Older Women’s League, who received the Simpson email, made it public in a statement released (pdf) Wednesday.
In an email to Ashley Carson, OWL Executive Director, Simpson refers to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” Simpson also insults her intelligence, and claims she doesn’t do “honest work.” This kind of language plainly displays a complete disregard not only for women and seniors, but for the American workers who pay into Social Security throughout their working lives, and who receive benefits they earned through their own contributions. Taking those benefits when a worker can no longer work is not “milking the system.” It’s our money, and we deserve it.
Ashley Carson states: “This kind of blatant disrespect for women, and for the social fabric of our coun-try, has no place in a serious discussion about our deficit. Mr. Simpson’s fifteen minutes of sexism and degradation are over. Now is the time for serious people to have serious conversations about how to move our nation forward, protecting the men and women who have worked their whole lives to make this country great.”
But Simpson is just one cog in a Commission that is fundamentally undemocratic. Serious decisions about programs that provide health care and retirement security should not be shifted away from the elected Members of Congress, who answer to their constituents, to a select group of political insid-ers. And forcing Congress to vote on whatever recommendations the Commission makes – without the ability to debate and amend the recommendations – flies in the face of democracy.
Alan Simpson must be removed, but we should not forget that he is just one sexist, disrespectful and embarrassing component of a process that usurps the rights of citizens to hold their elected representative accountable. OWL looks forward to a serious, respectful, and honest debate in both Houses of Congress about the real causes of the deficit, and real solutions. Alan Simpson and the President’s Commission are not part of the real solutions Americans need.
Simpson has reportedly “apologized” for his remarks. But a storm of protests and calls for his removal have continued unabated.
I always thought that the deficit commission was a bad idea; it has only looked worse over time, as the buzz is that Democrats are caving in to Republicans, leaning ever further toward an all-cuts, no taxes solution, including a sharp rise in the retirement age.
I’ve also had my eye on Alan Simpson, the supposedly grown-up Republican co-chair, who has been talking nonsense about Social Security from the get-go.
[...]
And no, an apology won’t suffice. Simpson was completely in character here; it was perfectly consistent with everything else he’s said, and with his previous behavior. He has to go.
Ryan Grim reports at the Huffington Post with a host of updates on the growing coalition calling for Simpson’s removal and opposing plans to cut Social Security.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
Sam Seder has a great new video now featured on StrengthenSocialSecurity.org on what working people think about the attempts to weaken Social Security while giving tax breaks to the rich.
Rather than extending tax breaks for those who already have plenty of money and cutting Social Security, a fair tax approach could actually strengthen and expand Social Security. That’s exactly what EPI economist Monique Morrissey proposed earlier this year, and highlighted in a brief New York TimesOp-Ed piece on Sunday:
Do you want to know how much LeBron James pays in Social Security taxes each year? Bill Gates? Oprah? Your dermatologist? $6,622. That’s the maximum anyone pays in Social Security taxes, because earnings above $106,800 are not taxed.
By slowly raising the cap — say, 2 percent each year, though increasing it faster would raise more revenue — so that it eventually covered 90 percent of all income, we could eliminate roughly a third of Social Security’s projected shortfall. Next year, people like Mr. James would pay slightly more than they pay now while eventually receiving slightly higher benefits.
That would help restore a balance to our tax base that has disappeared over the past few decades, as incomes among top earners have grown so much more than incomes among those earning below the cap. Indeed, 16 percent of earnings in this country are completely untaxed by Social Security — a huge windfall for the rich and a terrible shortfall for the benefits program.
Better yet, we could close about 70 percent of the shortfall if we immediately eliminated the cap on the employer side. Both employers and employees pay a 6.2 percent Social Security tax on earnings only up to $106,800. Instead, employers should pay their share of the tax on their employees’ full salaries.
I’m sure someone, somewhere would complain that this just makes too much sense.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year.
As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.
The entire piece is well worth reading as he picks apart the arguments put forward by the deficit-fraud austerity hounds, and then…
But, in America, we do have a choice. The markets aren’t demanding that we give up on job creation. On the contrary, they seem worried about the lack of action — about the fact that, as Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco put it earlier this week, we’re “approaching a cul-de-sac of stimulus,” which he warns “will slow to a snail’s pace, incapable of providing sufficient job growth going forward.”
It seems almost superfluous, given all that, to mention the final insult: many of the most vocal austerians are, of course, hypocrites. Notice, in particular, how suddenly Republicans lost interest in the budget deficit when they were challenged about the cost of retaining tax cuts for the wealthy. But that won’t stop them from continuing to pose as deficit hawks whenever anyone proposes doing something to help the unemployed.
So here’s the question I find myself asking: What will it take to break the hold of this cruel cult on the minds of the policy elite? When, if ever, will we get back to the job of rebuilding the economy?
Yesterday’s report of rising initial unemployment claims marked the fourth such increase in the last five weeks, and as Laura posted here, the 500,000 initial claims last week were the most since November 2009.
In the context of utterly stagnant private sector job growth, these reports scream for major stimulative action, including major new jobs programs from the administration and Congress as well as a massive Federal Reserve response to boost the economy.
What these reports also highlight is the need to strengthen the unemployment insurance programs already in place and extend them to the many newly unemployed workers, even as measures are pursued to address the crisis facing the already long-term unemployed.
The most recent extension of the federal unemployment benefit programs, which finally passed after a two-month battle to overcome Republican-led obstruction in the Senate, provides eligibility to those programs through the end of November for those who exhaust the 26-weeks of regular state benefits before that date.
In most cases this means that those workers who become unemployed after June 1, 2010 currently will not be eligible for the extended federal programs. That’s already a lot of newly unemployed workers. Since the first week of June, more than 4,600,000 initial claims have been reported.
Some of these recent initial claims are, no doubt, from unemployed workers who are filing anew following the end of temporary jobs, and are returning to the unemployment benefit systems in their states. It is not known what percentage of initial claims are re-entrants to the programs. But it is estimated that a much higher proportion are actually newly unemployed workers.
Congress will need to address extending long-term jobless benefits yet again when it returns from the August recess.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year
In response to this post last week featuring the report from Demos on the increase in low-income voter registration in Ohio — in which I wondered if other states were seeing similar progress — the folks at Demos tweeted me:
Demos_Org hi mitchell, ty for highlight Ohio report, see the following in response to your ?: http://bit.ly/bpWx6r
which links to this Ideas&Action blog post with more good news on low-income voter registration in other states.
Missouri experienced a roughly 1,600 percent increase in low-income citizen applications for voter registration at the state’s Department of Social Services, with 246,020 applications processed in the twenty-two months following a successful court action to improve compliance.
In North Carolina, well over 100,000 low-income citizens applied to register to vote through the state’s public assistance agencies since the State Board of Elections worked cooperatively with Demos and others to improve NVRA compliance, a six-fold increase over the state’s previous performance.
The number of voter registration applications from Virginia’s public assistance agencies increased five-fold after Demos worked cooperatively with state officials to improve their procedures.
The increase in low-income voter registration in these states is the direct result of states successfully implementing Department of Justice guidelines requiring public assistance offices to also provide voter registration forms and processing services.
If officials in other states follow the DOJ guidance and learn the lessons of these states, huge numbers of new or previously-missed voters can participate in the coming election season.
The author is the winner of the 2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year
