Jobs: A Time to Focus
Jesse Jackson
This week as families gather for Thanksgiving, too many will be saying prayers more in desperation than celebration.
The jobs picture is bleak — and continues to get worse. Now we’re told that if nothing is done, unemployment is likely to continue to rise through next year. States and localities, hit by plummeting tax revenues, are gearing up brutal cuts — and tax and fee increases. Students demonstrated last week in Berkeley and other California campuses after announcement of a staggering 32 percent increase in tuition over the next year. An estimated 900,000 jobs are about to be lost just from state and local cuts. While Wall Street is planning record bonuses, Main Street hasn’t begun to recover. Small businesses still can’t get loans. Malls are scarred by empty stores, even at the beginning of the holiday shopping season.
That’s why the president’s announcement of a jobs summit on Dec. 3 is so important. It is vital that the administration and Congress make jobs their central focus. We need new and bold action on putting people to work.
The Congressional Black Caucus made the urgency clear by blocking a House vote on financial legislation. They argued that we can’t go on with business as usual. Their districts are hemorrhaging jobs. What started as a short-term crisis in the Great Recession is rapidly turning into a long-term structural jobs deficit, one that may condemn as much as half an entire generation of young people to joblessness, poverty and hunger. Congress can’t keep worrying about Wall Street while ignoring the devastation of our cities.
There isn’t any secret about what needs to be done. We need a direct public program — an urban corps, a green corps — to put young people to work immediately on tasks that need to be done. We need aid to states and localities to head off the mass layoffs that are coming and the cuts in vital services or hikes in fees like the California tuitions. We need to be serious about driving the transition to new energy — money to retrofit public buildings to be energy efficient, putting construction workers to work; finance packages that can let folks save on their energy bills by adding insulation or energy saving devices to their homes. We need a large-scale public investment bank to mobilize private and public capital to invest in rebuilding America – everything from the modern electric grid to repairing aged sewage systems that are leaking poisonous wastewaters across the country. We need to use the bailout funds that the banks are repaying to provide lines of credit to small businesses looking to expand.
Republicans and conservative Democrats raise a storm about borrowing more money for these purposes. The chattering heads are arguing that the president should focus on deficit reduction, not jobs. Their scare campaign says the country risks a collapse of the dollar, a spike in interest rates, even default on our bonds and the fall of the heavens if we keep on borrowing.
This is purposeful hysteria. Yes, U.S. deficits are high. That shouldn’t be a surprise in a downturn this deep. Tax revenues have fallen; expenditures on unemployment and food stamps have soared. Bush left us with a large deficit before the crash. The Obama recovery plan is a small part of the deficit — too small.
No one “likes” deficits, but forget the stuff about the U.S. going bankrupt. Our debt level — compared to the size of our economy — is still one of the lowest ratios in the industrialized world. The dollar is still seen as an island of safety — that’s why money across the world rushed into the dollar when the crisis hit, and why we still can borrow at remarkably low interest rates today.
What’s more, the whole idea that you can balance the budget by cutting spending and raising taxes in a recession is wrongheaded. Cut spending now and you’ll cause more layoffs. Raise taxes and you’ll cause more layoffs. Once the economy starts growing and people go back to work, then growth and employment will help lower the deficits by raising tax revenues and lowering spending on supporting those who are unemployed. If we invest now to make our economy more efficient, to give young people work experience, to capture the lead in the new green industrial revolution, we’ll be able to reduce the deficit over time. Cutbacks now will only lead to another downturn.
So it is time to stop the posturing. Wouldn’t it be sensible if just once Republicans didn’t vote no as a bloc? This is a national crisis. It is time to act.
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