In light of Friday’s crummier-than-expected jobs report, Hardball’s Michael Smerconish spoke to two of the country’s most knowledgeable economists, former chief economist to Vice President Biden, Jared Bernstein, and former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich about how President Obama should proceed from here.
Here’s the framework: no president since the Great Depression has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 7.4%. As we learned today, we’re stuck at 8.2%. Smerconish asked Robert Reich, “Is it time for the president to put aside the 9-iron and bring out the driver? Does he need to do something more bold, relative to the economy?”
Reich knows his stuff. He said:
“I think so, Michael. He was dealt a terrible hand, the worst economy since the Great Depression. Though, he’s going to have to say something more than 'we’re making progress, it’s slow progress, I was dealt a bad hand.' He’s got to be a bit bolder. He could say, if I get the votes…we’re going to have a new works progress administration, a civilian conservation core. We’re going to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. We’re going to rebuild education. We are going to have a first class nation in every respect, and we’re going to fight and keep fighting for average working people.
The president can say, what about a middle class tax cut, what about exempting the first $20,000 of income from the Social Security Payroll Tax. He can say, I, the president of the United States, am not going to stop making new proposals simply because the Republicans say no.”
Jared Bernstein agreed:
“I think that’s precisely the kind of thing the president should talk about. Now, he doesn’t need to introduce, necessarily, a bunch of new things. He can say, absolutely correctly, I’ve got ideas that I’ve been trying to promote on Capitol Hill for well over a year and some of them are just really good common sense. For example, we know that last month we shed 14,000 jobs in local education. 23 of the last 25 months, the public sector has shrunk. Now, you should go forward at a time like this and say, folks, these are your teachers, these are your police, these are your firefighters…the president has to explain to people who is standing directly between them and a better economy, better opportunities and more jobs – and that would be the Congress.”
Check out President Obama and Mitt Romney’s responses to the June jobs report here.
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Isn't this the same drivel we've been hearing from ineffective Western economists for several years? The fact is, our continuing economic ills are the result of the sudden immersion of Asia's massive labor force into the developed economies of Western nations. A billion impoverished workers cannot be absorbed into a complex and highly developed economic structure such as ours without creating near-total economic dysfunction. We are now witnessing the end game, a permanent shift of wealth and power from West to East, and no amount of internal financial manipulation - taxes, spending, phony infrastructure jobs or loans - will remedy our economic decline.
John
I agree with you entirely..that grab for the fast easy money of the greedy 1 % has destroyed our whole economic base and Romney wants more of the same cheap labor and big profits. Romney understands how it works he has been the architect for the last 20 years. How to destroy jobs while bring down our wages..when it all gets said and done people will be working for $1.60 per hour.