Dean Baker: Nice work if you can share it

[marmar]

from the Guardian UK:



Nice work if you can share it
If Congress is serious about addressing unemployment, it will act on bills that aim to strengthen work-sharing programmes

Dean Baker

guardian.co.uk,
Monday 1 March 2010 21.00


The housing bubble and subsequent crash were the result of extreme incompetence on the part of the country's top economic policymakers. Somehow these people could not see, or did not care about, the dangers of an $8tn housing bubble.

Unfortunately, economic policymaking is not like most jobs where workers get fired when they make serious mistakes. In economics, they just keep getting promoted. Therefore, the people who sank the economy are for the most part the same group of people still designing policy today. Now this group of incompetent economists is telling the rest of us that we are going to have to endure five more years of high unemployment.

However, the rest of the country should not be forced to suffer even more just because those determining economic policy cannot do their jobs. We know how to get the unemployment rate down. Keynes taught us more than 70 years ago that we just have to spend money to eliminate mass unemployment. People work for money, if the government spends, people will work. It's pretty straightforward.

But, the deficit hawks seems to have largely closed this route. Members of Congress somehow think that they are helping our children by putting their parents out of work. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/01/unemployment-congress-work-sharing