Below is the PolicyLink statement on the Senate Jobs Bill. For more information or to talk with our experts, please contact Dan Lavoie at dan@policylink.org.
“In passing the $15 billion jobs bill, the Senate’s bipartisan majority should be commended for heeding the voices of struggling Americans.
“But the road to a truly fair and sustainable economy is a long one. More must be done to get help to those hit first and worst by this recession, especially low-income communities and people of color.
“As we move forward in building an innovative, expansive, bipartisan recovery plan, we must make significant investments in job-training programs and a range of infrastructure projects – public transportation, schools, energy efficiency – that create jobs now and set our communities up for future success.
“This bill is a good first step. But America’s long-term resurgence requires that all of our communities are connected to opportunity and can contribute their full talents to our revival. We urge Congress to continue to advance a jobs agenda that lifts up all our communities.”
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget ran into immediate trouble in Congress on Monday among lawmakers who said it tries to do too much while cutting the deficit too little.
The quick response came as Obama sought to juggle his twin goals of creating jobs, which entails tax cuts and new spending, and cutting the deficit, which involves the opposite.
“States Restart Health-Care Push,” - The Wall Street Journal Tight Budgets May Limit Legislative Efforts to Lift Coverage as National Plan Stumbles
With the fate of a national health care overhaul unclear, state legislators are pushing their own bills aimed at expanding coverage, though tight budgets are likely to hinder many of these efforts.
Lawmakers in at least two states, California and Missouri, have introduced legislation for the current session to create government-backed coverage for state residents. In others, including Virginia and New Jersey, legislators are hoping to tweak existing state programs to include more people.
The first lady takes childhood obesity as her cause.
The White House Kitchen Garden is frozen under, but, this Black History Month, first lady Michelle Obama is once more using food to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that has gripped the country and, she said in a recent speech to the United States’ Conference on Mayors, “never fails to take my breath away.”
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will make it easier for cities and states to spend federal money on public transit projects, and particularly on the light-rail systems that have become popular in recent years, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Wednesday.
Administration officials said they were reversing guidelines put in place by the Bush administration that called for evaluating new transit projects largely by how much they cost and how much travel time they would save.
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s emergency spending measures last year saved up to 2 million U.S. jobs, the White House said on Wednesday, but it warned that the outlook for the economy remained uncertain.
Obama, anxious to reduce double-digit U.S. unemployment which has dented his popularity, has already called for additional government measures to boost jobs on top of the $787 billion stimulus package he signed in February 2009.
Americans are fat, but at least they’re not getting fatter.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans are overweight or obese, but that number hasn’t changed much in the last decade, according to a team of doctors Wednesday in two studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Today, I will join more than 130 innovative nonprofit leaders, small-business owners, global CEOs, and community leaders at the White House Jobs Summit. I am honored by this singular opportunity to bring the voices and ideas of low-income people and communities of color to the table.
But I sincerely hope this talented group does not merely attempt to restore our pre-recession economy. We must come out of this crisis stronger, with an inclusive, expansive economy that harnesses the skills of all people. We can no longer waste the talents and potential of millions of Americans.
In a report we released today – Finding Work, Finding Hope: A Step-by-Step Guide to Get Your Community Stimulus Dollars (and Jobs!) — we have laid out a short-term roadmap to help communities access federal stimulus dollars. The guide provides phone numbers, web sites, application links and all the other information you’ll need to get stimulus dollars to your community.
Train the next generation of “middle-skill” workers
Stop foreclosures and put people to work keeping foreclosed properties from becoming blighted
Start the “green revolution” in low-Income communities
Invest in the long-term infrastructure of all communities
This is, of course, just the start. Do you have other ideas? Share them in the comments section.
The Jobs Summit should mark a banner day for all of us who work to ensure all Americans have the opportunity to participate and prosper. Because a recovery without equity is no recovery at all.
Also lost in the wrangling over the huge House economic measure were two programs for the poor that are in urgent need of Congressional attention: legal services and access to family planning.
The proven national program of civil legal aid for impoverished Americans, created in the 1960s, is suffering from multiple blows in funding. While the poor are caught increasingly by foreclosure, eviction and food-stamp fights for their daily bread, deficit-bedeviled statehouses across the country are cutting support for legal services or dropping the programs outright.
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington — U.S. Rep. Hilda L. Solis, President Obama’s choice for Labor secretary, faced new obstacles after lawmakers who were expected to vote on her confirmation Thursday abruptly canceled the hearing amid reports of back taxes owed by her husband.
Solis, a Democrat from El Monte, is at least the fourth Obama nominee whose confirmation has been complicated by tax troubles.
WASHINGTON — The unemployment rate rose to a 16-year high 7.6% in January as employers slashed a seasonally adjusted 598,000 jobs, the most since 1974, the government said Friday in a report that showed the job market deteriorating at a rapid clip.
More than 11.6 million people were out of work last month, up 54% from a year ago and the most since December 1982, when the economy was emerging from one of the deepest and longest recessions in U.S. history.
With all this stimulus news going around, we not only have to comprehend what “a trillion” really means, but also try to track just where all this money is going. ProPublica, a non profit newsroom, offers some powerful visualizations of what sectors make out the best in the current stimulus bill :
They also produced a map showing the pretty obvious inverse relationship between per-capita infrastructure spending and jobless rates…the higher the per-capita spending, the lower the unemployment rate:
Pro Publica used a very interesting tool to make these graphics and maps. Many Eyes, IBM’s stab at “democratizing information”, allows anyone to “visualize” complex data sets. And just like a YouTube video, these can be embedded into sites and blog posts (like we’ve done here). But there is a deeper dimension to this tool. The data you used gets added to the pool of data available to other map makers. Yours may be on infrastructure. But your data is now available to someone working on a health or education visual. So by using this tool, you’ve not only met your immediate objective (creating a map or diagram), you are helping meet your overall objective…adding to the larger community’s understanding and knowledge base.
America is in a hole. In the gravest threat to our economy since the Great Depression, we are facing rising unemployment; soaring food, energy, and health care costs; growing debts; a shrinking middle class; and widening inequality.To help us climb out, President-Elect Barack Obama plans to spend more than $700 billion on infrastructure projects. This is promising, to be sure, but we need even more.
If we do this right, the Obama administration’s stimulus package can lay the groundwork for a healthier and more prosperous nation, not just in the months ahead, but for generations to come. Big problems require big, bold solutions and this crisis requires nothing less than the reimagining of the American city. Let me explain: for decades, public policy has been to pour money into new highways to far-off suburbs, enabling even more sprawl and making us even more dependent on our cars. That kind of thinking is a non-starter. America needs smarter, more targeted spending (in people, places, and projects) that gets a solid return on our investment and actually strengthens communities too often left behind.
Everybody will be focusing today on the scary top-line unemployment number: 7.2 percent. That is frightening for millions of Americans — and portends a truly abysmal job market for anyone looking.
But the Bureau of Labor Statistics report includes something that should really send a cold chill through the labor market: the number of “involuntary part-time” workers has reached 8 million, a massive year-over-year jump and the highest in history.
(click to enlarge)
The ranks of the underemployed is stunning….and especially worrisome for those just one or two paychecks away from economic ruin. Competition for low-wage jobs will surely increase in the coming months and low-skilled workers will have a much harder time finding new employment if they lose their current job.
That’s why job training, job retraining and apprenticeship programs are so vital. We have to give low-income people — especially young people — the chance to compete in this 21st century economy.
Yes, 7.2 percent is a big, scary number. But, sadly, it may only obscure the true breadth of the problem.
Thanks to Calculated Risk for the graph. If you want to understand the economics of the current downturn, head over there…very digestible and insightful stuff.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office today released a grim look at the state of the American economy. Some of the harsh lowlights:
More people need food stamps. Government spending on food stamps, designed to help the poor buy basic commodities, will grow by 27 percent this year. CBO said spending will hit $50 billion, from $39 billion last year, mostly because of growing caseloads and benefits as food prices have risen. A record 31.5 million people were signed up for food stamps last September, according to government records.
Unemployment rolls are growing. Washington’s spending on jobless benefits will nearly double, to $79 billion this year from $43 billion last year. CBO thinks the jobless rate will rise to 9.2 percent next year, from around 6.7 percent now.
There is much hope in the air in this country…but hope alone won’t fix these problems. There is much work to be done…
Did poor and minority borrowers cause the housing crisis?
That seemed to be the consensus from the fight over the failed $700 billion bailout bill. As Congress and the Treasury Dept. debated how to fix the mortgage mess, the battle over what caused it took hold.
A prime suspect soon emerged: The government forced banks, lenders and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans in poor neighborhoods to meet affordable housing goals and regulations. The loans went bad, setting off the market meltdown.
A top Madison Police Department official says the city should reduce or freeze building low-income housing because the tenants are overwhelming police services.
In addition, Jay Lengfeld, captain of the West District, wrote an e-mail to Madison Alderman Thuy Pham-Remmele, 20th District, on Monday in which he suggested the city should license landlords to “weed out the bad ones” and give landlords more leeway to reject applicants with a history of bad behavior.
The Census Bureau recently released the official numbers on income and poverty last year (2007) in the United States. Let me underscore a few of the key facts that these data illustrate.
First, poverty did not fall to any appreciable extent during the economic expansion of the 2000s. This is quite unusual. Figure 1 shows the poverty rate and the unemployment rate. In past decades, these two indicators have moved together. When unemployment fell in the 1980s expansion, so did poverty. Unemployment and poverty both fell rapidly in the strong expansion of the 1990s. But when unemployment fell after 2003, poverty remained essentially flat.
