Great editorial in this AMs NYT, pointing the way forward, and featuring FAST!
To say such legislation will be a heavy lift is a vast understatement, but I agree with this:
“It is past time for Mr. Obama to send a jobs plan to Congress that has popular appeal, one that he can use to try to shame Republicans. He will need cooperation from the Senate, which should bring one jobs-related bill after another to the floor, forcing its members to approve jobs initiatives or go on the record to show that they just don’t care.”
It’s going to be hard to get jobs legislation through a House that thinks cutting spending is the key to creating jobs. The good news is that the American people have never thought worse of the GOP, so hopefully next November we will kick out the job killers known as the Tea Party and reinstate people that actually understand economics.
Of course Senators don’t care, but then again, most Americans don’t care. No one I know – no one – is willing to help the unemployed if it means we have to sacrifice. Many people think the government is corrupt and we propose to give them more money to handout to their corporate contributors? It doesn’t matter if it helps a few unemployed because the process is corrupt.
The social contract is in tatters and, frankly, it’s not up to the President or Congress to repair it. You cannot make people feel guilty about their personal prosperity when in their gut they think all those who are “suffering” in some way deserve their fate. You cannot expect people to contribute when they know in their gut that most of it will be skimmed off by corruption.
This is the credibility problem liberals face today. No one believes that the spending will do any good. No one believes we can make it “targeted and temporary” because the only target we’ve ever hit is corporate profits.
I think you overuse “no one”. I agree 100% with the NYT piece and Jared.Just as the Republicans got burned worse than the Dems and the public’s perception of the Tea Party went into the tank when the debt ceiling negotiations showed them to be intransigent …. if the Dems bring one job bill after another to the floor and let the Repubs and Tea Partiers kill them, they will see their standing with the moderate, swing voter continue to decline. Why the Dems aren’t already doing this eludes me
I’m feeling optimistic on this bright, sunny Monday morning in Tucson, Arizona.
Why? Because there’s an election next year. And a lot of those intransigent House members, no, make that all of them, are up for re-election. Which means that, if they don’t want to join the ranks of the unemployed, they’d better cook up ways to help them.
That leads right to the source of my optimism: Politicians doing the unexpected.
I’m old enough to remember coming downstairs to the breakfast table and hearing a rather shocking bit of news from my mother. This was during the latter half of 1971, and Mom’s all agog about something she’d just heard on the radio:
Nixon was going to China.
Yup, the Commie-hater himself was going to (gasp!) Red China. And he did just that, in February 1972.
ISTR that the China trip helped him in the November election. That and having the good fortune of a weak Democratic opponent, George McGovern. (Recall that the Watergate scandal didn’t blow up until the spring of 1973.)
I predict that in the coming months, we’re going to see a lot of “Nixon goes to China” moments.
Fight. Lose, but stay organized. Recruit. Win.
Schakowsky deserves praise for offering something that (a) will employ people usefully and (b) pay for it by collecting more taxes from the very highest-earners and corporations. The GOP won’t allow it to pass the House but let’s record votes.
“Editorial”
So it is confirmed that the NYT had a reason not to repeat the question from the June poll about government spending to create jobs, given the result from that poll. By avoiding mentioning government spending, specifically, as the source of jobs, the editors of the NYT can give the impression to readers that the question that was asked in the latest poll implied an opposition to fiscal “austerity”, while avoiding giving this impression to the actual respondents in the poll.
Certainly the editors of the NYT mean all the best, given their limited imagination or knowledge of how to fix unemployment without government spending and the attitude by economists that a glorious failure to prevent austerity is more “rational”, and therefore better for one’s professional reputation, than an ignoble defeat that involves solving unemployment but with a reduction in GDP. Sort of like how (academic, presumably) economists are said to be embarrassed to take the time to vote in an election because it isn’t “rational”… the NYT cannot be blamed for its efforts when even the ‘experts’ do not give reliable advice on the range of available options.