Category: The New Depression

Structural unemployment

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

This is what I meant when I kept saying Obama didn’t have executive ability. People retorted that he ran an effective campaign, and I gave up trying to explain at that point, because the candidate really has very little to do with running the campaign other than his input into staff hiring, and Tom Daschle made most of those major decisions.

Obama would rather preside over a graduate seminar than make hardnosed political decisions, and that continues to be a major flaw. Krugman:

Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story — apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.

More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.

Yet someone who has Obama’s ear must think otherwise.

No wonder we’re in such trouble. Obama must gravitate instinctively to people who give him bad economic advice, and who almost surely don’t share the values he was elected to promote. That’s what I’d call a structural problem.

Laid off

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’m very sorry to hear this. But then, I’m very sorry to hear whenever anyone loses their job, and I’m even sorrier to hear that someone’s unemployment benefits have run out — and that no one seems to give a damn, not enough to do anything about it:

Nobody is safe.

Velma Hart, who burst onto the media scene after telling President Obama she was scared about her financial future, has been laid off. Hart was let go as the chief financial officer for Am Vets, a nonprofit Maryland-based veteran services organization.

Hart has become another casualty of the tough economy in which so many people have lost their jobs.

“It’s not anything she did,” said Jim King, the national executive director of Am Vets. “She got bit by the same snake that has bit a lot of people. It was a move to cut our bottom line. Most not-for-profits are seeing their money pinched.”

King would not say whether the organization had had other layoffs.

“Velma was a good employee,” he said. “It was just a matter of looking at the bottom line and where could we make the best cuts and survive.”

King hadn’t seen the irony in Hart being fired just two months after she emotionally told Obama about her fears for her own financial well-being during a town hall meeting in Washington.

Hungry

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So the Republican scumbags are doing everything they can to block more unemployment extensions, and they’ll probably be successful. (All I can say is, I dream of guillotines.)

But if you have anything left to spare, please consider a donation of food or money to your local food bank. These folks are knocking themselves out to help against some stunning odds, and anything you can do to help in the name of our common humanity is a blessing:

The economy may be showing signs of life, but food pantries and other nonprofit food-distribution agencies around the region say they are struggling to meet record-breaking demand as the holidays approach.

In Loudoun County – the nation’s wealthiest county measured by median income – the food pantry is distributing its first-ever Thanksgiving meal, giving food to 2,000 families. In Montgomery County, the Manna Food Center added some Saturday hours for the convenience of working families. And in Fairfax County, the nonprofit Our Daily Bread is facing the grim reality that, although it will feed 2,400 people, it may not be able to help as many 650 needy families at Thanksgiving.

Lynn Brantley, president and chief executive of the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, said this year was the most difficult in the organization’s 30-year history. The food bank – the main supplier of food to more than 700 agencies and nonprofit groups around the Capital Beltway – will distribute a record-breaking 30 million pounds of food, up from 27 million last year.

“With this economy, things are pretty bleak,” Brantley said. “People on Main Street are not rebounding.”

Bread lines have become commonplace, including the 3,000 people who waited for groceries and personal-care items in Northeast last week at a giveaway co-sponsored by PepsiCo and the dozens who gathered in front of the Loudoun Interfaith Relief center Friday.

Many are unemployed or underemployed, and their desperation is palpable.

Joyce Crawford used to make a big Thanksgiving spread for her children and grandchildren every year, with turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, and steaming bowls of collard greens.

That was before – before she lost her job as a secretary, before she went on unemployment and then to a minimum-wage job raking leaves, before she had to give up her place to move in with her 37-year-old daughter. Now, she said, she doesn’t have anywhere of her own.

But this Thanksgiving she is determined to cook as usual, even though she’s broke and has to squeeze into her daughter’s tiny apartment kitchen to do it. For Crawford, it all came down to a donated 12-pound Safeway brand turkey in a cardboard box. She might not have all the traditional trimmings, but she had that.

GOP to jobless: Drop dead

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Citizens, do your part. Die!

Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Bob Casey (D-PA) want the Senate to take up and pass a one-year extension of unemployment insurance benefits from 26 to 99 weeks, but they did not sound hopeful on a conference call that this could get done before the extension lapses at the end of November.

Getting jobless benefits passed in the lame duck session is going to be a tough road. Congress has always passed emergency funding for extended unemployment benefits in a time of high joblessness, any time the topline rate is over 7.2%. But even with 59 votes, the Senate has faced an arduous series of votes to extend it out month by month this year. The last attempt in April needed multiple cloture votes, with several failing before the final success. At the time, Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins said that would be the last extension they would vote for that wasn’t offset with some other revenue or spending cut. Ben Nelson (D-NE) has joined them, making it virtually impossible to find the votes.

Adding to this is the fact that the House and Senate will not be in session at all next week, meaning the deadline for getting this passed without a lapse in benefits for the jobless is Friday. Sen. Reed said that with respect to any vote on this, “at this point it’s not been scheduled… I can’t point to a specific time it would come up for a vote this week.” Two million Americans could lose their benefits by the end of the year if this doesn’t get extended, according to the National Employment Law Project. And after that, with an incoming Republican House and more Republicans in the Senate, it would seem virtually impossible to get UI benefits passed.

At the same time as this is happening, Republicans want to extend the high-end Bush tax cuts, at a cost of $700 billion dollars, without paying for them. So they want to allow tax cuts with little stimulative effect to go unpaid, and then insist on paying for UI extensions with major stimulative effect. “It’s like someone on a diet who orders a Diet Coke and a Big Mac simultaneously,” Reed said. “Republicans are trying to rewrite economics and reality.” Extending unemployment benefits gets money into the hands of people who need to spend it, while tax cuts for the rich often lies fallow. Economists have shown that UI extensions are far more stimulative; one report said that failure to pass an extension would shave 0.5% from GDP growth, and reduce consumer spending.

15 million unemployed

~ susie

And the NY Times makes a budget game!

I was arguing with other progressives about this yesterday, saying it was skewed simply by virtue of which options it included and which it ignored. (You’ll remember I made the same argument after attending the AmericaSpeaks town hall and going through a similar exercise.)

The slightly-informed majority of the attendees came to the same conclusion: We needed single-payer health care to close the deficit gap. (Guess what? We still do.)

But Dean Baker actually makes an equally compelling argument: With 15 million people unemployed, why is the NY Times pushing the conventional wisdom about the deficit?