From Bob Herbert in the New York Times
The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.
It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.
Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.
Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.
But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.
Sounds about right.
That was “nice” way of explaining the truth…
I don’t know. I think that Americans just don’t get how important health care reform is. If there was a public health care system in the United States, people stuck in jobs or chronically unemployed could take more risk with starting new ventures, quitting salaried positions for small business creation and so on. The very real fear that people will be killed by the costs of an accident have kept many of my friends locked in jobs they hate, being as unproductive as possible because there is no passion in their work.
A single payer health care system would make the American labour force more mobile and flexible and won’t contribute to economic recovery I think, and a diversity of economic activity on the small and local scale. Public health care and no taxes on the forst $100,000 of small business revenue would probably do wonders.
the downturn is structural too. The manufacturing jobs are gone for good and Obama missed a HUGE opportunity with the bailout to jumpstart a new manufacturing sector with green jobs. Throwing Van Jones under the bus was the signal that the administration was scared, and that they were out of ideas for truly retooling the economy. Now everyone wants them to put it back where it was 15 years ago and that isn’t going to happen.
Choose a bold way forward or languish – that is what Obama is faced with.
Honestly i do not think that Mr.Obama is helping the economy getting jobs for people that need them. And i think that many of our leaders in the U.S don’t understand that people are losing houses, jobs, and small bussiness left and right.