After a week of non-stop Osama Bin Laden, Washington is now returning to the battle over the budget deficit and the debt ceiling.
All over Capitol Hill Republicans and Democrats are debating spending caps and automatic triggers, and whether to begin them before or after Election Day.
But if you don't mind my asking, what about the economy? I'm not talking about the economy five or ten years from now, when projections show the federal budget wildly out of control or when foreigners might start dumping dollars.
I'm talking about the here and now economy -- the one Americans are living in day to day.
The Labor Department reported today that unemployment for April was 9 percent, up from 8.8 percent in March. And of course that official figure doesn't count the percent of Americans working part-time who'd rather have full-time jobs.
Yes, 244,000 jobs were added in March, but that's chicken feed. We'd need 350,000 a month, every month for the next three years, simply to get back to where we were before the Great Recession.
And the percent of working-age Americans actually working -- 64.2 percent -- hasn't improved. It's as low as it was in the depths of the recession. 13.7 million people remain out of work.
Hello Washington?
Even for Americans with jobs, wages are going nowhere. Basically, the only employers hiring are paying peanuts. McDonalds just announced it would start hiring big time.
In fact, there's reason to worry we're heading back toward recession. The Labor Department also reports new claims for unemployment insurance soared to 474,000 last week.
Between January and March of this year, the U.S. economy slowed to a crawl -- a measly 1.8 percent annualized growth -- down from over 3 percent last fall. Higher gas and food prices are putting even more of a squeeze on American households.
And housing prices continue to drop.
Washington is fighting over how much to cut spending over the next ten or twelve years. But right now we need more public spending to get people back to work, stronger safety nets to help those who have lost their jobs or can't find new ones, lower payroll taxes on average workers, and a requirement that Wall Street banks renegotiate mortgage loans so Americans can keep their homes.
Why isn't Washington paying attention to what most Americans need in the here-and-now economy?
Because the White House and congressional Democrats don't dare admit how bad the economy continues to be for so many people. They're holding their breath, hoping the recovery catches fire next year before Election Day.
Republicans don't dare admit how bad the economy is because they don't want to increase public spending or strengthen safety nets. And their patrons on Wall Street don't want to modify mortgages. Republicans would rather Americans believe their big lie that taming the deficit will create jobs and restore the economy.
Washington would rather fight over the long-term budget, spending caps, taxes, and trigger mechanisms than do something about the pain most Americans are experiencing today.
But the here-and-now economy the most important thing on Americans' minds.
Ironically, Washington's disregard for what's happening right now is also worsening the long-term budget problem. That problem is not the debt per se; it's the ratio of debt to the overall economy. If the economy sputters or continues to grow at a snail's pace, that ratio becomes worse and worse.
In other words, attending to the here-and-now economy is also good for the future.
Earth to Washington: Listen to America.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
We need smart individuals educated in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics that can invent and create new products and services to sell to foreigners if US citizens are not willing to compete on product costs, which means matching foreign labor, foreign energy and foreign environmntal compliance costs.
If you build a factory to build widgets and sell these widgets to people outside of your country and collect foreign currency from outside of your country then your country (family, island, and/or nation) becomes more wealthy, and more of that wealth can be SKIMMED OFF to fund pork barrel projects, fund payrolls, military payrolls, or be able to pay off your federal government debts.
US government administrations of both major political parties have created "Free Trade" legislation killed and eaten that golden goose that laid those golden eggs that created new wealth, won WWII, and created the abundant lifestyle that US citizens enjoyed for a couple of decades after WWII and the government also de-emphasized engineering, technical and scientific educations.
Yes, this is oversimplified, but the principal of accumulation of wealth (manufacturing marketable things with value) is basic.
Future wars might be industrial wars where the nation with the most wealth creating industry will win the economic war! And non-wealth producing nations like the USA might destroy their own economies with deficit government spending which will impoverish all of the US citizens.
We must all realize that without greedy businesses trying to make profits, there would not be any jobs, not even government jobs because without profitable businesses, the government would not have hardly any wealth available to be forcibly taken from the profitable businesses and individuals as taxes in order to pay government bureaucratic payrolls and jobs created by government pork barrel expenses.
To ignore the US government deficit spending will certainly destroy purchasing power and value of the US dollar when the wealth producing individuals in the industrial nations stop buying the Freshly printed US Treasury Bonds that the FED periodically prints and sells at auction (discounted) to get US dollars back from the Industrial nations that make the products that the US consumes, or they it they will only pay a fraction of a penny on the US dollar for these freshly printed paper US Treasury Bonds!
What if the US government borrows a lot of money from individuals and governments in the wealth creating industrial nations and then spends that borrowed money on green jobs, renewable energy, infrastructure renewal, welfare, unemployment, social security, national healthcare, police, firemen, school teachers, wars and similar non wealth creating expenditures for taxpayer supported government activities?
ONLY THE NATIONAL SOVEREIGN DEBT WILL INCREASE.
There are a few additional sources of Government revenue such as Import duties, mineral right royalties from government lands, sales taxes, etc.
Who are these people trying to kid?
Mr. Reich, please be fair. Both r's AND d's are beholden to Wall Street. It's the Reid / Boehner Corporatists, not the Sanders / Paul Populists, who report to Wall Street.
And all these jobs never get any government "safety net" benefits when the Feds are handing out cash to Unions members.,
Nor does it count just-graduating college students [or those who graduated a year, or even two ago and STILL haven't found jobs] because they can't file for unemployment.
Please, Professor Reich, do a column on the "real" unemployment numbers.
This is the attitude of "look what I've got that you don't got". Until the rich are modified in their greed behavior nothing will change
We are on the edge of another crash. Look at the criteria, free money, commodities + stock bubble, fueled by .5% fed interest rate. And the solution seems to be more free money! NOT!
In my Neighborhood, affluent Maryland, we lagged the initial 2008 crash by about 9 months with the forclosures, then it settled. Now, in the past 2 months, we had another round of empty houses. Not good!
We need support, a safety net, and when we pay for health care we need to get it, not have to keep paying and paying. These things will bring stability, not a free ride for U.S. corporations or lower taxes for the rich.
In my state, we have many "affluent" areas. They are easy to find. Just look for clusters of McMansions with aging for-sale signs on the deep, manicured lawns.
Main Street America has been hemorrhaging for years. The upper Middle Class that once thought they were immune has since learned that they are not. To bad the rest of us didn't take notice before the hemorrhage turned into a flood.