In today’s issue of the New York Times, Nobel Prize laureate in Economics Paul Krugman calls for greater efforts by the Obama administration to target stmulus dollars for short and long term job creation. He says “unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come.
“Indeed, the administration’s own economic projection — a projection that takes into account the extra jobs the administration says its policies will create — is that the unemployment rate, which was below 5 percent just two years ago, will average 9.8 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2011, and 7.7 percent in 2012.”
In a related article in the same issue authored by Jack Healy, the government announced the economy shed an additional 263,000 jobs in September while the official unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent. According to the article.”The numbers could intensify pressure on Congress to provide additional unemployment benefits and extend some programs that are set to expire toward the end of the year, such as tax credit for first-time homebuyers and health-insurance subsidies for people who lose their jobs.
“’It’s a very fragile and tentative recovery,’ said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. ‘Policy makers need to do more.’”
Timing is everything in today’s stiumulus planning. I would urge my readership to contact their Democratic Party senators and ask them to petition the Obama administration to increase and target stimulus funding to lay the foundation for job creation and development. As the astute Krugman points out, “The conventional wisdom is that trying to help the economy now produces short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain. But as I’ve just pointed out, from the point of view of the nation as a whole that’s not at all how it works. The slump is doing long-term damage to our economy and society, and mitigating that slump will lead to a better future.”