Depression? Action This Day

I never quite know what to make of Robert Reich. He’s a devout Clintonite, which is a decidedly mixed bag in my opinion, and was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. (He was not, you notice, in the Treasury Department in that administration.) He is definitely liberal and usually in a thinking way, but at times he sounds like a mindless, parroting ideologue. He comments extensively on television these days; usually on economic matters, though his education and teaching background seems to be more on political and social theory. I’m not sure where his economic theories come from, because they are not spelled out in his curriculum vitae, but he is no fool and is worth listening to.

Certainly on Friday’s subject of his Blog he knows what he’s talking about, what with being a former Secretary of Labor,

The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent.

Elsewhere, I have seen him define the last category as “a computer programmer who is working part time as a store clerk because he can’t find anything else.” Defined in that way, I would definitely count that person as “functionally unemployed.” 15.6 percent.

Later in the post he comments with respect to the stimulus package passed by Congress that, “only a small fraction of the $787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far.”

That is where I accuse him of the “mindless ideologue” bit, because only a small fraction of that $787 billion is ever going to create any new jobs, and an even smaller fraction is going to do so during this particular economic crisis. That is a fact that he omits to mention in any of his discussions, creating the impression that he believes the Obama Administration has devoted a full $787 billion to a jobs creation program.

Of that money, $288 billion was tax cuts; zero jobs created. $90 billion was for education; some teachers jobs were saved, zero jobs created. $82 billion was for extended unemployment benefits; certainly needed, zero new jobs.

That leaves a total of $327 billion for programs purportedly devoted to jobs creation, but further examination reveals more focus on social policy than on jobs which will be created during this particular crisis. There is $8 billion for the “development of intercity transportation with a focus on high speed rail.” Certainly that will create some jobs, but not for several years, and there’s no certainty about those jobs even then. There is $50 million to “support artists.” Supporting the arts is good social policy, policy which I support, but let’s not pretend that it creates needed jobs and stimulates the economy and let’s not pretend that it belongs in an “economic recovery bill.”

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.

So what does he then proceed to list as spending priorities? Grand social policy programs for the future; green energy, oil independence, etc. Not one single program that will put large numbers of people to work before the end of this year. He would leave thirteen million people out of work now and allow millions more to become unemployed in the hopes that someday in the future…

I’ve said this before. When FDR saw that he had millions of people out of work, homeless and hungry he did not say to his people, “Design me a grand Interstate Highway System that we can build five years from now.” What he said was “Get me millions of shovels, and do it today.” He then put those shovels in the hands of those men (they were all men in those days) who were jobless, homeless and hungry.

We do need long term solutions, but in reaching for those solutions we simply cannot overlook the needs of today. We are overlooking the needs of today, and as a result those problems are becoming worse and worse. We are reluctant to address them either because we do not know what the solution is or because we are unwilling to apply the solution. But these problems will not go away. They must be solved, and solved now.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the nuclear Navy, could not tolerate sloth and bureaucracy. He would receive a memo about a problem and he would scribble a note on it and pass it to the person responsible for the solution. At the bottom he would scrawl a notation that became his signature slogan,
“Action this day.”