by Arianna Huffington

Band-Aids, Bipartisanship and Baby-Steps: How Not to Deal With a Jobs Crisis

"You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps," said World War I-era British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. And you can't cross it in a series of little steps, either.

On the first anniversary of the passage of the stimulus bill, the country's best economic research firms agree that the often-derided bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs -- with more on the way. This is obviously good news. But it shows how monumental a chasm we are facing that, even with those jobs, unemployment is still hovering around 10 percent -- and real unemployment at around 17 percent.

With 15 million people out of work (and if we count the underemployed and those too discouraged to look for work, 26 million), and with six unemployed jobseekers for every opening, it's no wonder The New York Times describes the jobs bill taking shape in the Senate as "so puny as to be meaningless."

Less than a month ago, during his State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, "Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010." So why is there no sense of urgency coming out of Washington?

Perhaps the reason can be found in the stunning results of a study conducted by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Studies that broke down the unemployment rate by income. Unemployment for those making $150,000 a year, the study found, was only 3 percent in the last quarter of 2009. The rate for those in the middle-income range was 9 percent -- not far off the national average. The rate for those in the bottom 10 percent of income was a staggering 31 percent.

These numbers, according to The Wall Street Journal's Robert Frank, "raise questions about the theory behind what is informally known as 'trickle down' economics, since full employment at the top doesn't seem to be translating into more jobs below.'"

In fact, these numbers do more than raise questions -- they also supply the answers.

Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington wouldn't be wildly different if it was the unemployment rate in the top 10 percent that was 31 percent? If one-third of television news producers, pundits, bankers, and lobbyists were unemployed, would the measures being proposed by the White House and Congress still be this pathetic? Of course not -- the sense of national emergency would be so great you'd practically be hearing air raid sirens howling.

Instead we get baby steps, bipartisanship and Band-Aids -- timid moves that, given the seriousness of the crisis, threaten to change the very fabric of our society. For much of our history, America was known for its upward mobility -- and the promise that hard work would be rewarded with your children being able to do better than you. That promise has been called into question over the past three decades, and an extended run of high unemployment could be its death knell.

"These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution," wrote Bob Herbert. "And such gruesome gaps in the condition of groups at the top and bottom of the economic ladder are unmistakable signs of impending societal instability. This is dangerous stuff."

So dangerous, in fact, that when it comes to jobs we can't afford a repeat of the health care reform fiasco, in which the president decided to sit out the debate, emerging only to give vague statements of encouragement and cryptic pronouncements about what he actually favored (does anyone, even at this late date, have a clue what that was, by the way?).

Already, the latest jobs bill is barely more alive than its near-comatose health care and financial reform cousins. It was a good sign earlier this month when Harry Reid took the jobs bill away from Sens. Max Baucus and Charles Grassley, who, under the increasingly fetid banner of "bipartisanship," were busy larding it up with all sorts of giveaways to big business and K Street. Republican senators responded to the move by taking to their fainting couches, but it was clear that the concessions being made to secure a "bipartisan" bill meant, essentially, a worthless bill.

"It does show," The New Republic's Jonathan Chait wrote, "just how steep the price of securing bipartisan support actually is -- you're reduced to essentially symbolic legislation."

So, going monopartisan was good. What wasn't good was replacing the bipartisan bill with measures that were simply way too small in scope. The provisions Reid proposes -- a Build America Bonds program for state government infrastructure needs, a small business tax credit, a payroll tax holiday -- are good, just grossly inadequate.

As James Galbraith notes, "We have to turn the corner on the notion that this is just a pump that needs to be primed, an engine that needs to be restarted, something that can be kicked back into functioning form with a little extra federal spending."

So what sorts of ideas are out there that Congress and the president should be considering?

The most immediate step -- and one of the most effective -- is direct aid to local and state governments. Since August 2008 over 150,000 state and local jobs have been eliminated, and, according to CNNMoney, states are currently looking at a total budget gap of $180 billion for fiscal 2011. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that state and local deficits could cost the country an entire point off the GDP, which would in turn lead to the loss of another 900,000 jobs next year. This is why the Economic Policy Institute recommends the federal government spend $150 billion on aid to state and local governments over the next year and a half, an investment that would save up to 1.4 million jobs.

The Reid bill, by the way, contains no state aid (although he hopes to back a state aid measure in the future).

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich also favors direct aid to state and local governments, as well as a focus on helping troubled homeowners by letting them include their outstanding mortgage in personal bankruptcy, which, as Reich notes, "would give them far more bargaining leverage with mortgage lenders."

Available at Amazon.com:

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

How Not to Deal With the Jobs Crisis | Arianna Huffington