You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There\u2019s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. <\/font><\/p>\n This is wrong and unacceptable. <\/font><\/p>\n Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn\u2019t mean that full employment is just around the corner<\/strong>. Historically, financial crises have typically been followed not just by severe recessions but by anemic recoveries; it\u2019s usually years before unemployment declines to anything like normal levels. And all indications are that the aftermath of the latest financial crisis is following the usual script. The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent \u2014 a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago \u2014 until sometime in 2012. <\/font><\/p>\n And the damage from sustained high unemployment will last much longer. The long-term unemployed can lose their skills, and even when the economy recovers they tend to have difficulty finding a job, because they\u2019re regarded as poor risks by potential employers. Meanwhile, students who graduate into a poor labor market start their careers at a huge disadvantage \u2014 and pay a price in lower earnings for their whole working lives. Failure to act on unemployment isn\u2019t just cruel, it\u2019s short-sighted.<\/font><\/p>\n So it\u2019s time for an emergency jobs program<\/strong>. <\/font><\/p>\n How is a jobs program different from a second stimulus? It\u2019s a matter of priorities. The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough \u2014 but it wasn\u2019t<\/strong>. And as a matter of political reality, it\u2019s hard to see how the administration could pass a second stimulus big enough to make up for the original shortfall. <\/font><\/p>\n So our best hope now is for a somewhat cheaper program that generates more jobs for the buck. Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs. <\/font><\/p>\n One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments<\/strong>, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can\u2019t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.<\/font><\/p>\n Meanwhile, the federal government could provide jobs by … providing jobs. It\u2019s time for at least a small-scale version of the New Deal\u2019s Works Progress Administration<\/strong>, one that would offer relatively low-paying (but much better than nothing) public-service employment. There would be accusations that the government was creating make-work jobs, but the W.P.A. left many solid achievements in its wake. And the key point is that direct public employment can create a lot of jobs at relatively low cost. In a proposal to be released today, the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that spending $40 billion a year for three years on public-service employment would create a million jobs, which sounds about right.<\/font><\/p>\n Finally, we can offer businesses direct incentives for employment<\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n I have little to add. We\u2019ve been waiting for wealth to trickle down since 1980. It hasn\u2019t. It won\u2019t. It gushed up and will continue to so so until we correct the insane injustice that the bottom 40% of Americans own only 0.2% of the wealth<\/font><\/strong>. Therefore, to pay for Krugman\u2019s jobs programs we need to restore the progressive income tax structure gutted by Reagan, Bush I, Crawford Caligula, and the GOP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While Congress continues to bail out Wall Street, Main Street continues to suffer. We need jobs! If you\u2019re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment \u2014 the time the average job-seeker has […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"employment\"](\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/KrugmanTheJobsImperative_1D32\/employment.jpg\" "\\"employment\\"")
<\/a> If you\u2019re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings<\/strong>, and the average duration of unemployment \u2014 the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work \u2014 is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. <\/font><\/p>\n