Americans Need Jobs
We’re in a heap of hurt here, people. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5%, and real unemployment, which includes those who have stopped looking for work, is still at 16.5%. This means we have nearly 30 million Americans competing at a ratio of 5-to-1 for what jobs are presently available. A continued jobless recovery with the possibility of a double-dip recession — what’s the average American to do?
People can help improve the situation by voicing their opposition to the anti-job policies promoted by certain factions in the federal government. The current focus on the deficit would be one such item. The last thing we need now is to further reduce the purchasing power of average Americans by trying to cut deficits at the expense of the middle and working classes. We successfully climbed our way out of a 122% deficit after World War 2; we’ll climb out of today’s 94% deficit too. The screech of the deficit hawks is really nothing but a wrong-minded attempt to draw attention from where it belongs — on job creation.
Concerned citizens can also make a difference by ignoring the fear mongers and voicing support for programs designed to help average Americans and create jobs. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is one such program. Though it’s taken a beating from conservative trash talkers, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the program has created between 2 million and 4 million full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs, helped raise the GDP, and served to restrain further increases in unemployment. The only real problem with the stimulus is that it was too small.
If citizens really want to make progress, they need to compliment the above with a full court press on the Obama economic team. The trillions poured into Wall Street must at this point be considered a bad investment. The money cycle is still stalled, with small business and average Americans frozen out, while the banks that were saved are enjoying free money from the Fed and still partaking of the gambling practices that crashed the economy. Wall Street greed is the closest thing there is to a direct cause of these dire economic times — you can’t remove 8 million jobs from the economy and just keep on truckin’. The Obama team can, at the very least, increase the price of money to force these thieves to lend again. Obama can also appoint an advocate for the middle class to chair the newly created CFPB.
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