There was a must read article in the July 13, 2009 issue of The Nation magazine. "Our Jobless Recovery" by Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo W. Gerard is a skillful and principled critique of the Obama administration's economic policies, the stimulus bill, and the shortcomings of both.
Obama has spoken forcefully about laying a new foundation for the economy, one that creates good jobs and rising incomes and that moves us from an era of borrow-and-spend to one where we save and invest and are able to produce more at home than we consume. And we agree these are the right goals for the nation. However, we do not believe that the policies the administration is pursuing will get us there, nor is the administration's economic stimulus plan likely to move us toward anything approaching full employment.
The Obama administration needs to pull its head out of the sand. It will take more than inspiring rhetoric for the United State's economy to prosper, and the more the Obama administration delays, the more damage will be done to our industrial base.
Democrats in Congress must not let the Republicans bluff them out of acting dynamically to create jobs. Remember: the Republicans want the Democrats--and out nation--to fail.
Democrats in Congress and in the Executive to need to absorb a simple fact: you cannot save the economy by destroying the middle class in order to save the upper class. And yet that is precisely what the stimulus bill seems designed to do.
The stimulus bill seems to consist of two basin elements: modest tax cuts for those who already have jobs and big contracting projects that are intended to trickle down into job creation. But we all know how that will go: the big corporate contractors will win the contract, rake off excessive profits, and subcontract the actual work. By the time the subcontractor--and the sub-subcontractors--get around to hiring a handful of people to do the actual work, the jobs will be minimum wage and/or taken by illegal aliens working for less than minimum wages.
Congressional Democrats and President Obama need to get to work on aggressive job creation legislation. They need to attack this issue with the same focus that they did with the bailout of the banks.
Congress allotted a staggering $388,000,000,000 to the TARP program. The median household income here in Virginia is $57,679. Do the math: for the money that was pissed away bailing out the bankers who destroyed our economy, we could have created 6,726,885 temporary jobs that would have paid the median household income of ordinary Virginians.
The people who had those jobs would have been able to pay their bills, get health insurance, hold onto their homes or apartments. They could have paid off debts to banks, helping to keep healthy banks afloat.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the "stimulus bill," has a price tag of about $787,000,000,000. That should equate to another 13,644,481 jobs at Virginia's median income, but we all know that won't be the case. We all know that most of this money will be skimmed off in various ways. The Obama administration admits that the stimulus will only "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, and says nothing about the rate of pay for these job, whether they will be enough for ordinary Americans to support their families or pay their debts.
Ordinary Americans are the backbone of this nation. The Democrats cannot save the economy unless they save ordinary Americans. The Republicans want the Democrats to fail at this task so they can exploit it at the ballot box. What are the Democrats waiting for?