"The Get America Working! approach would work, in effect, by correcting a major price distortion. The current U.S. Internal Revenue Code taxes employment far more heavily than it does the use of natural resources. This distortion has grown progressively worse as payroll taxes have grown. Revising this distortion would increase employment, equity and overall economic vigor importantly. And it would do so by responding to market price signals, not through clumsy and expensive government interventions."
Hugging The Third Rail: Unemployent Is So Bad, Washington May Finally Cut Payroll Taxes
I'm no economist, though I've worked with plenty of them. As a public interest and public policy PR consultant, the economic indicators I notice most are perceptual and rhetorical: things like the steady uptick in comparisons to the Great Depression, and the new CNN/Opinion research poll that says concern over unemployment has tripled in recent months, making it the top economic issue facing Americans. I also note the unemployment worries have prompted some counterspin, for example the claim by Christina Romer, head of the National Council of Economic Advisers, who says current unemployment is not really so bad that it bears comparison with the Depression. Here's an NPR Morning Edition piece about that.
This leaves some cognitive dissonance in the heads of us non-economists, who have to wonder, poll numbers and competing expert claims aside, how bad is unemployment now, in based on the evidence?
The answer, as I've discovered working on employment policy issues, is much worse than we think. It's not just the latest dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers showing the highest unemployment in over 25 years, and 4.4 million jobs loss since the recession started in December 2007, 2.6 million in the last four months, with well over half a million jobs hemorrhaging month to month. It's not even the fact that the job loss is unusually broad-based, cutting across American industries, demographics and geography.
Date:
03/18/2009 (All day)
Source:
The Huffington Post
Summary:
I'm no economist, though I've worked with plenty of them. As a public interest and public policy PR consultant, the economic indicators I notice most are perceptual and rhetorical: things like the steady uptick in comparisons to the Great Depression, and the new CNN/Opinion research poll that says concern over unemployment has tripled in recent months, making it the top economic issue facing Americans.
