frustratedDean Baker | Stimulus and Jobs: We Can Do Better
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The Obama administration came out with its first set of numbers on the jobs impact of its stimulus package. It's pretty much along the lines of what was predicted. To date, the package has created close to one million jobs. That is good news, but in an economy with more than 15 million unemployed workers, it is not nearly good enough. We need to do more, much more. Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 in order to shorten their workers' hours while leaving their pay unchanged."
We have swarms of unemployed people already who feel useless. We have a highway system that is literally falling apart. We have schools short on teachers, hospitals short on practitioners, heck almost every company has cut back workers and therefore isn't getting as much done. We have a gazillion repairs in need of doing because people can't afford to call a plumber or roofer or whatever. And the government wants to pay people not to work?
AAAAAAAAA *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* Is it raining FAIL today or what?
How about the wacky idea of paying people to DO some of the stuff that's not getting done for lack of funding? Or hey, we could pour some grant money into overworked charities so they can chip a bit to their volunteers -- like, say, food pantries, all of which are running on overdrive these last couple years.
November 2 2009, 23:25:13 UTC 11 years ago