President Obama and Congress need to pay attention to today's lead story in the New York Times. It is proof they should fix the economy first and then deal with costly new cap and trade and health care reforms.
Not that reducing greenhouse gases or providing less costly health care and insurance isn't a priority, but unless we get people back to work, focus on economic recovery and figure out how we are going to pay for all of these new federal government initiatives since the President took the oath of office, we may find ourselves in even a deeper recession.
On the unemployment front, the nation's jobless rate rose again. The lead paragraph in the Times today said it all: The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold. The losses for June lifted net jobs shed since the beginning of the recession to 6.5 million — equal to the net job gain over the previous nine years.
“This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said in a research note. She called this fact “a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007.”
In Washington State the unemployment rate in May rose to 9.4 percent. In some areas, like the Vancouver-Portland metro area, the jobless rate is over 12 percent.
FIX THE ECONOMY FIRST, PUT PEOPLE BACK TO WORK AND DO THE MATH ON THIS NEW SPENDING FOR NEW PROGRAMS IS GOING TO COST US TAXPAYERS.
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
