It
By
Robert Reich Read Spanish Version
The
March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of
Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you
include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a
job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include
people working part time who’d rather be working full time, it’s now
up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either
unemployed or underemployed.
Every lost job has a multiplier
effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a
job and can’t find another, or is trying to enter the job market and
can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more
anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now
is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work.
This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend
money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to
spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job
losses.
Capital markets may or may not unfreeze under the
combined heat of the Treasury and the Fed, but what happens to Wall
Street is becoming less and less relevant to Main Street. Anxious
Americans will not borrow even if credit is available to them. And
ever fewer Americans are good credit risks anyway.
All this
means that the real economy will need a larger stimulus than the $787
billion already enacted. To be sure, only a small fraction of the
$787 billion has been turned into new jobs so far. The money is still
moving out the door. But today’s bleak jobs report shows that the
economy is so far below its productive capacity that much more money
will be needed.
This is still not the Great Depression of the
1930s, but it is a Depression. And the only way out is government
spending on a very large scale. We should stop worrying about Wall
Street. Worry about American workers. Use money to build up Main
Street, and the future capacities of our workforce.
Energy
independence and a non-carbon economy should be the equivalent of a
war mobilization. Hire Americans to weatherize and insulate homes
across the land. Don’t encourage General Motors or any other auto
company to shrink. Use the auto makers’ spare capacity to make
busses, new wind turbines, and electric cars (why let the Chinese
best us on this?). Enlarge public transit systems.
Meanwhile,
extend our educational infrastructure. So many young people are out
of work that they should be using this time to improve their skills
and capacities. Expand community colleges. Enlarge Pell Grants.
Extend job-training opportunities to the unemployed, so they can
learn new skills while they’re collecting unemployment
benefits.
Finally, accelerate universal health care.
Robert
Reich was the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and is a professor at
the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is
"Supercapitalism." This is his personal journal.
