Let me suggest what to some in the Republican party is unthinkable: the Federal Government should take sixty billion dollars and directly create one million news jobs this year. We should hire half a million new teachers, a quarter million new polices officers, a hundred thousand new emergency responders and supplement our overstretched military with a hundred and fifty thousand new troops.
If census hiring has shown us anything, it's that in tight economic times government is the only employer large enough to budge the unemployment numbers. Today the bank bailout is estimated to cost this country over one hundred billion dollars. While jobs are a continuing expense neither police, firefighters or teachers are noted for being especially well paid. Creating one million jobs averages forty thousand dollars would payroll taxes and overhead. To account for these we'll increase the per employee cost to sixty thousand dollars.
[b]For Sixty Billion Dollars We Could Have One Million New Jobs.[/b]
While sixty billion per year is certainly a large sum of money, it falls short of the 500+ billion we'll spend on the military or the [b]One Hundred and Fifty Nine Billion Dollars[/b] that the Obama administration has requested for the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. If we're willing to spend hundred of billions to make sure a pig herder in Afganistan is ruled by the government we want, why can't we spend a fraction of that to help stave off economic collapse at home?
Right now the debate between austerity and spending is an abstract one. The Obama wants some money to do something with that's called a jobs bill. The only bit of the thing that the public can grasp is unemployment benefits. Lets take the debate from the abstract to the concrete. We want one million new jobs starting today.