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Friday 2 October 2009
The truth about jobs that no one wants to tell

So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going to do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don’t have customers aren’t going to do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations also suffering high unemployment aren’t going to buy a lot of our goods and services.

And without customers, companies won’t hire. They’ll cut payrolls instead.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Who’s going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There’s only one buyer left: The government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grand-kids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II. I didn’t even know what a debt was, but it kept me up at night.

My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR’s debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing.

You see? The most important thing right now is getting the jobs back, and getting the economy growing again.

People who now obsess about government debt have it backwards. The problem isn’t the debt. The problem is just the opposite. It’s that at a time like this, when consumers and businesses and exports can’t do it, government has to spend more to get Americans back to work and recharge the economy. Then – after people are working and the economy is growing — we can pay down that debt.

Notes

  1. inkyeagle reblogged this from azspot and added:
    So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as...
  2. monkeyairplane reblogged this from azspot
  3. fatimaronquillo reblogged this from fromthemountains and added:
    “The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling...a crisis was - and is - based on the
  4. fromthemountains reblogged this from think4yourself and added:
    This is the very crux of Keynesian economics - which was at one point the economic theory upon which the Obama...
  5. abcsoupdot reblogged this from azspot and added:
    So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as...
  6. think4yourself reblogged this from azspot
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