Gorilla's Blog

Unemployment claims: still above 420,000/week!

The President yesterday sounded like a man who didn’t understand basic economics.

The deficit fetish is wholly unnecessary.

Doing absolutely nothing about the deficit will in fact reduce the deficit further: let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, get health care reform up and running, and voila, the deficit disappears!

And surpluses would be the new normal if we simply got our health care costs down to the level of every other developed country!

Meanwhile, 25 million Americans are out of work.

America should be increasing its deficit in the short term to address this problem, particularly given how low interest rates are.

Bringing half of the unemployed back to work would significantly improve economic growth and help reduce the deficit.

The private sector simply doesn’t create enough demand at the moment to start hiring, so a government jobs program is needed.

Cost of hiring 10 million workers at $30K/year to fix infrastructure, bring energy efficiency to homes and businesses, and restore hope across the country: $300 billion/year, or less than half what we currently piss away annually on the Pentagon.

Other things that could be done:

Bring everyone into Medicare, which would significantly reduce health care costs.

Lower the Social Security eligibility age temporarily to 55, since most of the unemployed who are that age or older will never be hired again.

Set up a national infrastructure bank to finance the vast amount of work we’ve not been doing for the past 30 years.

Allow the dollar to decline further, addressing global imbalances that effectively allow surplus countries to keep Americans unemployed and Americans to export inflation to surplus countries.

Gorilla says: “The solutions are easy, but the leadership is absent!”