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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (549899)	3/9/2004 11:38:31 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769667

In the past 12 months, the debt has increased more than 10%. If the debt is increasing that fast during an economic recovery, how much faster will it increase if the economy slows down.

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (549899)	3/9/2004 11:39:22 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769667

All The State Government Jobs: How to Help in the Meantime By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, March 9, 2004; Page A23 washingtonpost.com Imagine if I told you that all the job growth in the country was explained by a rise in the number of people on government payrolls -- and that there had been no net increase in employment in the private sector. You might assume that those socialist Democrats were back in power and at it again, emptying the public till and expanding their patronage mills. But that would be wrong. The above is a description of the employment figures released last week after 38 months of a Republican administration insisting that large tax cuts for the wealthy would make the private sector hum and put everybody back to work. It hasn't happened. Last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payrolls expanded by only 21,000 -- far less than most of the experts expected. If it hadn't been for public employment, there would have been no net job creation at all. Washington didn't add those jobs. Federal employment was down by 3,000, according to the BLS. Most of the government job growth came from state government, said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The states alone added 20,000 jobs, largely in education. The unemployment rate of 5.6 percent sounds modest by the standards of the 1980s. But the number disguises the distress. Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) points out that the long-term unemployed -- those seeking jobs for six months or longer -- have made up more than a fifth of the total unemployed for the past 17 months. That's the lengthiest stretch of long-term unemployment in 20 years. And the unemployment rate is artificially low, because many potential job seekers have become so discouraged that they've stopped looking for work. Last month 392,000 people dropped out. The labor force has contracted in six of the past eight months. "That's unprecedented this far into a recovery," says Bernstein. Such measures of unrelenting weakness in the job market, he adds, would normally be associated with unemployment rates of 8 to 9 percent -- numbers associated with the recession of the early 1980s. That's why jobs are such a big issue in the presidential campaign. In explaining all this, it's trendy to argue about outsourcing. It's a useful debate. But we shouldn't wait for it to be resolved before acting to relieve the injury we know is out there. For example, doesn't it make sense to acknowledge the problem of the long-term unemployed right now? According to Isaac Shapiro, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, some 760,000 workers exhausted their unemployment benefits between the end of December and the end of February. Why? Nearly all who have exhausted their regular state benefits have been out of luck for additional help because Congress allowed the Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation Program to expire on Dec. 20. The program was passed in March 2002 and extended twice. Recent votes suggest a majority in the House and Senate -- nearly all Democrats and a significant number of Republicans -- favor extending it again. But the Senate Budget Committee voted down a Sarbanes proposal last week that would have pushed for a benefit extension. This week Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) is expected to propose an amendment on the Senate floor to make a benefit extension possible through the end of June. The political question: Will Republican congressional leaders and President Bush let the extension go though? "We can debate all we want as to what the best approach is to generate job growth," Shapiro says, "but until the jobs come back, we should agree to provide assistance to those being left behind in the labor market. We have been collecting numbers on this since 1971, and we have never had so many people exhaust their benefits and have to go without further aid. It's unprecedented." That word again. Extending unemployment benefits is the very least that should be done to deal with a strange job market. Sluggish job growth demands new efforts to guarantee health insurance to workers who find themselves in difficult transitions. Wage insurance, to provide a year or two safety net for the incomes of those who have to move to lower-paying jobs, might help. So could tax changes specially aimed at helping displaced workers. Above all, Washington needs to admit that an economy producing healthy profits but minimal new employment is not the middle-class jobs machine it used to be. Helping the unemployed now is just a modest down payment on a larger project to broaden the reach of growth and prosperity. postchat@aol.com © 2004 The Washington Post Company