We will likely find that unemployment is within an eyelash of 10% this morning.
This is intolerable.
It doesn't matter that things are not deteriorating as rapidly as they might to the unemployed or their families. This level of misery is unstable. This much jobless pain will end any government - with one exception. That one exception is when the public thinks the government is actively and constantly doing everything it can to end a jobless economy.
You might claim that you can predict with absolute certainty that things will improve. The entrails of chickens spread over the charts of change in the labor participation rates portends good things it will be argued.
We passed a stimulus and you could say that is all needed.
But change is a funny thing. It often switches directions. And a public aroused over unemployment isn't going to tolerate lackadaisical attention to the issue.
Are parents lavishing expensive gifts on their children as they do almost every pre-school buying season this end of summer? They are not! More important than the entrails over the dead indicators of yesterday is what people are doing or might do now and tomorrow. They are not going in hock to buy for this fall with pink slips still piling up in this depression. More stores will go bankrupt. More plants will idle It will swell the unemployment lines. We are in a vicious downward spiral. Hiding from that fact won't change things.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is forecasting total back-to-school sales of $17.4 Billion, a decrease of 13.2% from last year, while America’s Research Group expects a decline of 8.5-12% on top of a 5% drop in 2008. The NRF projects average spending per family with kids aged 6-17 to drop by 7.7% to $548.72, which would be the lowest since 2006:
Only government will spend now. Only unprecedented peace time spending will end this horror.
We did pass some spending. It was drowned in circumstances the authors of that legislation did not anticipate. The stimulus package designed to trim one point off an 8% unemployment rate is not equal to this task!
The Republicans will have a plan to end this Depression. You know what it will be. a round of tax cuts.
Democrats will be utterly flat footed and will lose the next election badly if they don't do what the public will accept as an end to this recession. Propose an absolutely no frills road, airport, rail and communications infrastructure bill of a huge scope that will be equal to the task of fighting Depression level unemployment.
Tax cuts will not solve this downward spiral because they will go to savings and not investments in goods and jobs. But Republicans will win this debate if they are the only ones with a plan for unemployment that has become far worse than predicted by the people who designed our last stimulus.
There is only one exception to the rule that Depressions kill governments. Roosevelt's government was perceived as doing everything possible to end disastrous levels of unemployment. They would never have survived lazily resting on the laurels of a public spending bill with wholly inadequate aspirations. Neither will this government. We will either do more or the republicans may finish this country's economy for a very long time!