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- iHaveNet.com: Economy
by Arianna Huffington
How Come Our Leaders Won't Set Their Minds on Jobs?
"We do big things," President Obama said during his State of the Union speech in January. And, in fact, we do. Sometimes. Finding and dispatching Osama bin Laden certainly qualifies. "We are once again reminded," the president said after announcing the terrorist's death, "that America can do whatever we set our mind to."
But if that's true, why are our leaders so accepting of a stagnant economy? If they really focused on the havoc it is wreaking on the lives of tens of millions of Americans, they would, in the memorable words of Richard Clarke, be running around with their hair on fire.
But they're not. Instead, they express concern but resign themselves to the fact that, as
It's a testament to these low expectations of our leaders that we're supposed to take recent economic figures as some kind of good news. In March, the economy added 216,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell from 8.9 percent to 8.8 percent. Not bad. But not good, either. Because while adding jobs is obviously better than shedding them, even if we continue to add 200,000 jobs a month, it would take until 2019 to achieve the employment level we had when the recession started.
What's more, much of the downturn in the unemployment rate was actually caused by people giving up and leaving the workforce. As The
April's numbers were equally disconcerting: even though the economy added 244,000 jobs, the unemployment rate rose from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. Even worse, the unemployment rate for African-Americans jumped to 16.1 percent. And for those over the age of 55, the average length of time spent looking for a job is now over a year.
Then there is the chilling reality that more than 28 percent of U.S. homes were underwater in the first quarter of the year, and foreclosures are expected to rise 20 percent this year. "We get tired of telling such a grim story," Zillow economist Stan Humphries told
Told, but apparently not listened to. At least not in Washington.
It's no wonder then that, according to a recent Gallup poll, over half the country currently believes we're in a recession or a depression. Or that a
How are these not hair-on-fire numbers?
Yet our leaders, who are supposed to be doing big things, seem instead to have made their peace with "the new normal." Take the Fed: it could be doing a lot more to create jobs, but instead it's guarding against the phantom bogeyman of inflation. "Why has Mr. Bernanke decided to accept widespread unemployment for years on end, even though he believes he has the power to reduce it?" asks David Leonhardt. "After all, does the economy feel as if it's on the verge of overheating?" Hardly.
At the
Our elected leaders aren't any better -- less focused on the job crisis than on arguing about how to best divvy up harsh cuts to the social safety net and programs that benefit the middle class. Meanwhile, profits for the Fortune 500 jumped by 81 percent in 2010, to $318 billion. Clearly big things aren't out of reach for everybody.
President Obama himself connected the economy to his can-do speech about Osama. Immediately after declaring that "America can do whatever we set our mind to," he said, "That is the story of our history, whether it's the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggles for equality for all our citizens."
If it's true we can do "whatever we set our mind to," then how about we set our mind to reigniting the American Dream for everybody, and not just those few for whom the recession is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind reality? There is no bigger Big Thing we can do as a country right now.
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If 'America Can Do Whatever We Set Our Mind To,' How Come ...