On the recordJune 14, 2011
rarely has Washington been so completely out of touch with the priorities and anxieties of ordinary working Americans. Here on Capitol Hill, policymakers are obsessed--obsessed-- with the budget deficit. But the rest of America is most concerned with a far more urgent deficit--the jobs deficit. Our Nation remains deeply mired in the most protracted period of joblessness since the Great Depression. Officially, some 14 million Americans are out of work. But real unemployment--the real unemployment, including those who are working part time but want to be working full time; those who are marginally attached; those who have never worked in the first place because they never got a job--if we add that all up, we have closer to 25 million Americans unemployed, and millions of Americans who are employed are increasingly anxious about holding on to their jobs or, at their present income, making ends meet. But many of our political leaders in Washington are treating the jobs crisis as yesterday's news. They are putting this deficit reduction above all else. They are demanding extraordinary funding cuts-- trillions of dollars in cuts, and the sooner the better, with little concern as to its adverse impact on jobs. But this is exactly the wrong approach. It is the economic equivalent of applying leaches and draining blood from a sick patient, which we used to do, by the way. That is what they did to George Washington as he lay dying. They applied leaches to him.…
