Mike Konczal dissects the jobs umbers and concludes:
There’s no silver lining in today’s job numbers. The discussion needs to shift away immediately from deficit reduction to jobs growth in terms of public works, tax breaks for workers and getting to the bottom of the foreclosure crisis and shadow housing inventory.
Here are the gory details: The July Jobs Numbers: There is No Silver Lining
The MMT prescription is a Job Guarantee aka employer of last resort or employment assurance program, a suspension of the payroll tax, and block grants for the states to prevent more layoffs, as well as financial reform and enforcement, and we need it now.
Mr. President, why are you wasting time on the debt and deficit pseudo-problem when the actual problem is idle real resources due to deficient demand? Failure to deal with the actual problem will just feed the pseudo-problem.
Marshall Auerback jumps in: Time to Panic (II)
Today’s unemployment data suggests that we are experiencing something far worse than a mere “bump in the road”, as our President described it last month. In fact, if last month was the time to panic, as Stephanie Kelton argued here, then today’s data should create real palpitations in the White House. This isn’t just a “bump,” but a fully-fledged New York City style pot hole.
Warren Mosler: "The problem remains a massive lack of aggregate demand." Valance Weekly Economic Reports
3 comments:
Dread naught, my Plan B has a Part II.
Check out this old op-ed by Austan Goolsbee (prior to his work in the Obama Admin). He suggested Congress rebase the penny from one cent to five cents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html
That's small ball. What if Congress rebased the 140 billion pennies in circulation to, say, $5? In a sort of a reverse helicopter drop, it’d provide $700 billion in fiscal stimulus at no cost to Tsy (or anyone else, vending machines don’t take pennies anyway).
"Mr. President, why are you wasting time on the debt and deficit pseudo-problem when the actual problem is idle real resources due to deficient demand?"
Probably because he's listening to people like Geithner.
And he's bending over backwards to try to get the independent voters in the middle, because he assumes he has the liberal vote all locked up.
He's wrong. And he's going to learn that in November 2012 when conservatives turn out in droves to vote for Bachmann, while demoralized liberals, still smarting over the cuts to SS that obama agreed to, stay home.
Get ready, everybody, for President Bachmann.
bite your tongue
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