It?s hard to avoid the sense that TIME is trying to offer the Obama administration a ready-made excuse for the impending failure of its economic policies. The magazine?s cover promises an article that will explain ?Why double-digit unemployment may be here to stay ? and how to live with it.?
Joshua Cooper Ramo?s story tells us how experts have been befuddled by the current economic slump, then offers the following observation:
America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression. It’s troubling not simply for its sheer scale but also because the labor market, shaped by globalization and technology and financial meltdown, may be fundamentally different from anything we’ve seen before. And if the result is that we’re stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while ? a range whose mathematical congruence with that other 9/11 is impossible to miss ? we may be looking at a problem that will define the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency the way the original 9/11 defined George W. Bush’s. Like that 9/11, this one demands a careful refiguring of some of the most basic tenets of national policy. And just as the shock of Sept. 11 prompted long-overdue (and still not cemented) reforms in intelligence and defense, the jobs crisis will force us to examine a climate that has been deteriorating for years. The total number of nonfarm jobs in the U.S. economy is about the same now ? roughly 131 million ? as it was in 1999. And the Federal Reserve is predicting moderate growth at best. That means more than a decade without real employment expansion.
Let?s set aside for a moment the ?mathematical congruence? that?s ?impossible to miss.? Please. Instead I?d like to focus on the ?careful refiguring of some of the most basic tenets of national policy.?
For a moment, I thought Ramo might be on to something: careful refiguring that would lead to lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government. Instead, he?s looking to the government to do more mischief:
[T]he problem of how America works needs to become the focus of an urgent national debate. The jobs crisis offers an opportunity to think in profound ways about how and why we work, about what makes employment satisfying, about the jobs Americans can and should do best. But the ideas Washington has delivered so far are insufficient. They reflect a pre?9%-11% way of thinking as much as old defense policy reflected a pre-9/11 notion of who our enemies were. The funding for job creation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was based on an assumed 8.9% unemployment rate. Now 15% is a realistic possibility. And yet we’re hearing few interesting ideas about how to enhance America’s already groaning unemployment support system as millions of Americans sit idle. Tangled in the debate over health care ? and bleeding political capital ? the White House may find itself too weak and distracted to deal with the danger of joblessness. We can’t afford to wait.
If you, like Ramo, think government bureaucrats or other ?experts? can tell us what we need to do to create the jobs of the future, perhaps you?ll want to flip to TIME?s last page, where Nancy Gibbs reminds us how wrong most of our expert predictions for the long-term future turn out to be.
So what should our government do about our unemployment problems? Stop what it?s doing now, as Roy Cordato explains below:
