Everybody Wants Feds to Create Jobs - What Are Dems Waiting For?

It's been obvious to liberals and other members of the reality-based community for 18 months, but it's finally starting to sink in: the only thing that will save this economy is a humongous, don't-look-at-the-price-tag jobs program, starting immediately.

Steve Benen:

It's worth noting, then, that there's at least some evidence that attitudes have shifted in a more constructive direction. This question in the newly-released Newsweek poll bears special attention:

"Which one of the following do you think should have the higher priority for policy-makers in Washington right now:
37% Reducing the federal budget deficit
57% Federal spending to create jobs
6% Don't know

This strikes me as very encouraging. For many Americans, the "deficit" has become an amorphous concept that they've been conditioned to viscerally reject, and the polling last year suggested this knee-jerk reaction was so strong, deficit reduction was actually perceived as more important than the economy itself.

But the Newsweek poll -- yes, I know, it's only one poll -- wasn't close. Asked which should be a higher priority, the deficit or spending money on job creation, the latter won by 20 points.

Dems on the Hill are afraid to make economic investments because they expect a public backlash. They're nervous enough about the midterms and aren't in the mood to hear another round of "government spending is bad." But here's data showing that spending on job creation is actually quite popular. Republicans would respond by saying the deficit matters more, but that's not where the public is right now.

So why not borrow the money and invest in job creation? Like, immediately?

Repug obstruction, you say. But that depends on a solid front, and cracks are appearing in that wall. karoli at Crooks and Liars finds a big one:

A conservative economist with a progressive idea? I'm guessing he won't be doing consulting work for the RNC anytime soon. Kevin Hassett is director of economic policy studies at AEI, a very conservative think tank.

But when I got him on the phone to talk about the unemployment crisis, he struck a different tone. His problem with the stimulus wasn't that government spending inherently fails to grow jobs and the economy. The problem, he said, was that Obama's stimulus was not direct enough.

With the Recovery Act, the White House eschewed direct hiring and aimed instead to raise overall economic output in the hope that more activity would lead to more demand, which would lead to more hires. "Look at the stimulus and the number of jobs we've actually created, and it comes out to a couple million bucks per job created," Hassett told me.

"My idea is simpler. Find the unemployed and hire them."

[...]

"Employers don't want to take a chance on some guy without a job for two years," he said. "The cycle is so long and deep that the cyclical becomes the structural." The easiest way for the government to end somebody's jobless spell is, very simply, to end it by straight-up hiring the worker.

"Since the economy has created this class of long-term jobless, the arguments for government hiring become stronger," he said. "If you give the person a job for a while, it helps them get a job later. You remove the stigma."

What a concept. Hopefully, the White House is paying attention. And Congress. And yes, even conservatives.

Yep, the same exact concept that put one million Americans back to work in a matter of days back in 1934, building the national infrastructre we still enjoy today.

Call or email your members of Congress and tell them to launch a massive federal jobs program right now.