Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

Togetherness

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Now that the stimulus spending is winding down (note to critics of stimulus spending, who said it didn’t do anything: if it didn’t do any good, why is the loss of it endangering the recovery?), the job market is looking grim again. For reasons I can’t quite fathom in this oddest of election years, neither party seems to have much to say about the number one issue in the polls: jobs. The Dems know that they can’t pass anything right now, but instead of trying to get a big jobs bill through, and forcing the GOP to defend the indefensible, they seem to have given up. The Republicans are all about one issue only–extending the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, because it’s not a good idea to raise taxes in a recession, although it’s hard to know who will be hurt by taking a bit more from really rich people, and on the discredited theory that keeping the tax cuts will create jobs, (note to GOP: where are all the jobs that the tax cut was supposed to produce in the first place?).

In the meantime, the millions without work can spend their days waiting for the economy to tank again and looking for jobs that don’t exist, or worrying about a mosque in New York or immigrants taking the jobs that don’t exist in Arizona.

On that Islamic Center issue, I just returned from a few days in New York, where nobody I met was talking about the Ground Zero mosque (note to readers: it’s a community center, not a mosque, and it’s not at Ground Zero) even though Rupert Murdoch’s Post was doing its lurid best to keep up with his Fox News and make an election issue of it. I’m convinced the only politician in America with any courage at all is Mayor Bloomberg (a Republican), who is still standing firm on the principle of freedom of religion.

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Recovery

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Medical marijuana shops are cropping up all over the place. We all know, of course, that this is a total sham; it’s a way to legalize marijuana while pretending that we’re doing it for purely ethical reasons. We won’t admit that the prohibition of ganja was as effective as the prohibition of alcohol, so we save face this way. But why stop there? There are equally good uses for dope, and times like these call for a little creativity. Here’s one way to expand the use of marijuana, also for humanitarian purposes.

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For This Bounty. . .

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Stei091119

I join the growing chorus of critics who don’t believe that Obama has focused enough on job creation. In fact, I’m more than a little disappointed in the tepid performance by Democrats in general. They won the election by large margins, yet they seem afraid to lead. The Republicans have been successful at all kinds of stalling tactics on judicial nominees (remember the outraged demand by Republicans for an up and down vote for Bush’s nominees?), many other appointments, climate change legislation, and the despicable tactics being employed against health care reform. Yet Democrats don’t seem to have the stomach for a real fight.

It will take political courage to spend the money needed for more stimulus aimed at job creation in the face of rising deficits, yet that’s exactly what most economists think we need. I also seem to remember the mantra that deficits don’t matter, when Bush was racking them up; evidently they only matter when Democrats control the White House. Yet the Dems apparently are afraid of the consequences if they actually get out in front of controversial legislation. As a good friend of mine, a recently-elected Colorado legislator, reminded me the other day, people don’t vote to re-elect legislators who do nothing, and they especially don’t re-elect cowards.

Let’s have some backbone, people. Do something.

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What Recession?

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

stei090718

Goldman Sachs has recovered quite nicely from the recession they helped create. They’ve paid back the bailout money already, and freed from the strings that came with it, they’re rewarding themselves for their business prowess with executive compensation above pre-crash levels. How did they do it? By being smarter than the other banks. Oh, it’s not that they didn’t play the same risky game with mortgage-backed securities and derivatives; they just saw the disaster coming before everyone else did and passed off their toxic assets to less prescient investors. To the victor the spoils. What’s especially troubling about all this is that neither they nor the government seems to have learned anything. So far the Wall Streeters in the Obama administration have shown little interest in actually fixing the system. The heart of the problem is precisely the executive compensation Sachs is lavishing upon itself. Without strict limits on how much these robber barons can help themselves to, the temptation to rig the game once more will be too great, and another economic meltdown is inevitable.

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