The growth in jobs of the last few months is welcome but fragile. Senators will cast votes this week that will either cost workers hundreds of thousands of jobs or save those jobs and put us on a surer path to create more.
The Senate is debating legislation (H.R. 4213) to restore unemployment benefits and health care for the unemployed, fund youth jobs, and prevent severe cuts in state medical and other services and hundreds of thousands of jobs that provide those services. The bill also includes another year of funding for an emergency fund for poor families with children; this year that fund has prevented destitution and created temporary jobs for a projected 185,000 parents. The question is, will there be 60 votes in the Senate to protect these jobs and services?
The Senators who oppose the bill say that it adds to the deficit. It does -- and, according to well-respected economists, that is what the economy needs right now. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke (PDF) told the House Budget Committee "this very moment is not the time... to radically reduce our spending or raise our taxes because the economy is still in recovery mode and needs that support." Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, has emphasized the importance of federal aid to prevent the loss of state jobs. Noting that about 200,000 state and local jobs have been lost over the past year, he warned "If state governments don't get additional help from the federal government in the coming fiscal year, then the job losses will be at least that large -- in all likelihood, measurably larger than that."
The pain of this recession will be with us for a long time. Goldman Sachs has predicted that unemployment will stay about where it is all through 2011, and that the pace of GDP growth will slow. Senators can either respond to this reality and sustain the economy through this dangerously fragile time, or they can repeat the mistakes of the 1930s and stop investing too soon. When that happened in 1937, it stopped recovery cold and, according to Nobel economist Paul Krugman, "the economy promptly plunged back into the depths."
If we end extra assistance to states to help them cope with rising Medicaid costs, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Governor Chris Gregoire of Washington State predicts layoffs of 6,400 workers beginning this summer. Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania expects 20,000 jobs to be lost if the Medicaid aid is ended. In Kansas, Governor Parkinson predicts the loss of Medicaid dollars will cost 4,000 teachers' jobs. Why teachers? Because states trying to preserve life-and-death Medicaid services will make cuts elsewhere, threatening education and much more, such as child care, mental health, and even services to protect children from abuse and neglect.
Voting against this bill is a triple wham. It hurts people who are forced into the unemployment lines; it hurts vulnerable people who are losing services; and it hurts our future by weakening our schools and our children's development.
The Economic Policy Institute points out that at some point over the past year, fully one-third of Americans have been unemployed or underemployed. That's a shocking number. The tentative beginnings of economic growth have not done enough for the mammoth numbers of people struggling with deep economic insecurity. Failing to restore the expired program of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless; leaving them with no way to afford health care; standing in the way of 300,000 jobs for youth and 185,000 jobs to keep poor families afloat; and making a bad situation worse by forcing more state cutbacks -- all of this should be unthinkable. If Senators want to take action to strengthen the economy, they should hurry up and vote for H.R. 4213.