It's a one-and-a-half dip recession, for sure
"...We're not in a double-dip recession yet. We're in a one-and-a-half-dip recession. Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average workweek is down. The only things not down are inventories — unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses, and inventories of unsold homes are rising — and defaults on loans. The 1.5-dip recession should be causing alarm bells to ring all over official Washington. It should cause deficit hawks to stop squawking about future debt, Blue Dog Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, and mainstream Democrats to get some backbone. The 1.5-dip recession should cause the president to demand a large-scale national jobs program, including a new WPA that gets millions of Americans back to work even if government has to pay their wages directly. Included would be zero-interest loans to strapped states and locales, so they didn't have to cut vital services and raise taxes. They could repay when the economy picked up and revenues came in. The national jobs program would also include a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income. The president should stop talking and acting on anything else — not the deficit, not energy, not the environment, not immigration, not implementing the healthcare law, not education. He should make the whole upcoming midterm election a national referendum on putting Americans back to work, and his jobs bill. Are you for it or against it? But none of this is happening. The hawks and Blue Dogs are still commanding the attention. Herbert Hoover's ghost seems to have captured the nation's capital. We're back to 1932 (or 1937), and the prevailing sentiment is that government can't and mustn't do anything but aim to reduce the deficit, even though the economy is going down..." Read rest of post
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