Dispatches: Jobs must be job No. 1

By Hank Kalet, Managing Editor
   An economic report issued earlier this week confirms the obvious: We are in an economic sinkhole that appears to have no bottom.
   According to the Sitar-Rutgers Regional Report, the first decade of the 21st century is likely to be “New Jersey’s lost employment decade.”
   ”It could be — and we stress could be at this point in time — the first time since the 1930s Great Depression that we may have fewer private-sector jobs at the end of a decade than at the beginning,” said the report, which was compiled by the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers and the Sitar real estate firm in Edison.
   The last nine months have been devastating for the state’s workers, with 18,700 jobs lost (an average of more than 2,000 a month), offsetting what the report calls “very modest and below-average employment growth” during the previous 57 months. And “significant additional losses (are) expected to occur over the next 18 months or so,” the report said.
   That’s obviously not good news for New Jerseyans, though we are not the only Americans in this sinking boat. The current downturn — which has featured not only the meltdown of the financial and housing sectors, but a crisis for the auto industry and the manufacturing sector as a whole — has driven unemployment up to its highest rate in 14 years, according to The New York Times.
   The numbers are staggering: The total “number of unemployed Americans” jumped in October to 10.1 million — “the largest number since 1983,” the paper said. The unemployment rate, low by historical standards because of changes in the economy, jumped to 6.5 percent with analysts expecting it to “reach 8 percent by the middle of next year.”
   The unemployment rate, however, does not provide a full picture of how bad things have gotten, as the Times reported. The percentage of people who are underemployed, “which includes people working part time for lack of full-time positions and those who have given up looking for work,” is now at 11.8 percent, the paper said. The rate was 8.4 last year.
   Plus, the paper said, more than a fifth of those out of work have been without jobs for more than six months — “another level not reached in a quarter-century.”
   ”What you see now is this cascading of unemployment moving from hours cut to hiring freezes to layoffs,” Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, told the Times. “At this point, we have a very toxic combination of all of the above. There’s almost no economic activity out there that’s going to generate jobs right now. This is the front edge of the deeper trough of the recession. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
   These numbers make it clear that we shouldn’t wait for President-elect Barack Obama to take office before putting in place policies that create jobs, aid workers and the unemployed and halt the rising foreclosure rate.
   President-elect Obama seems to understand as much. During his meeting with President George W. Bush on Monday, he pushed the president to move quickly to address the auto-industry collapse and enact a stimulus package that includes extended unemployment benefits.
   According to The Financial Times, the European financial daily, President-elect Obama explained the urgency of the situation Saturday during a radio address.
   ”We can’t afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, health care, education and tax relief for middle-class families,” the president-elect said. “We also need a rescue plan for the middle class that invests in immediate efforts to create jobs and provides relief to families watching their paychecks shrink and their life savings disappear.”
   President Bush, however, is reluctant to do much more than has been done, because of an ideological aversion to government safety nets.
   That means we will have to wait for Jan. 20, when President-elect Obama becomes President Obama for what U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat who will become chief of staff, called “an aggressive agenda on the economy.” That is expected to include extended unemployment benefits, aid to American automakers and strapped state governments, like New Jersey, money for infrastructure repairs and upgrades that will create construction jobs, middle-class tax cuts, health-care reforms, a new energy policy and programs designed to make education more affordable.
   ”The middle class must be the focus of the economic strategy,” Rep. Emanuel said. (The Washington Post)
   The financial meltdown, he said (The Financial Times) offers a “historic opportunity to deliver the large-scale investments that Democrats had promised for years.”
   And come January, the Democrats will be in a position to keep their promises.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be e-mailed by clicking here. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.