http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/09/toward-a-new-new-deal/On Thursday night Barack Obama delivered his highly anticipated jobs speech. At this point, it’s fair to say that he’s gone back to the usual predictable stuff—a one-year extension of the payroll tax cut, a continuation of unemployment benefits, some additional spending on infrastructure and tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire and invest in new capital. In short, too little of what will work and too much of what won’t for an economy that’s teetering on the brink of a double-dip recession and a president who is running out of time to deliver jobs. For the same price tag, the president could do something truly different—he could eliminate unemployment altogether by allowing the government to serve as “employer of last resort”.
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So even if President Obama’s package is passed (a big IF), it will simply prevent things from getting worse, and won’t improve the employment picture dramatically.
This is unacceptable. The job market is much worse than the official numbers suggest. Officially, we’ve got 14 million unemployed Americans looking for jobs—about four job seekers for every job vacancy. But those 14 million Americans are also competing with 8.8 million part-time workers who are hoping to land a full-time job. Since the recession began, employers have cut so many hours from the workweek that it is equivalent to the loss of a million more jobs. Add to that the roughly 2.6 million people who gave up looking for a job, and you’ve got about 25 million people needing more work and an economy that is creating no new jobs.
Whatever the president is able to deliver, it is certain to be too little, too late. Indeed, as Professor Eric Tymoigne has shown, by some measures job performance since the start of the “recovery” has been even worse than during the Great Depression. At the rate we’re going, it will take nine years to return to the pre-recession employment level; by contrast, in the 1930s the jobs lost in the aftermath of the Great Crash had been fully restored within seven years. The difference was the New Deal, which created jobs for 13 million Americans. President Obama has never displayed any Rooseveltian sense of purpose and he will not propose any comprehensive job creation programs like the New Deal’s WPA and the CCC.
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