"Words that make actions speak louder."
One development on the jobs front that received far less attention than it deserved was California Rep. George Miller’s reintroduction last week of his “Local Jobs for America Act,” a proposal that we vigorously supported and that received the backing of more than 300 organizations when it was first reintroduced two years ago. If this […]
Today’s jobs report from the Labor Department should not be spun as positive, even though at a net increase of 117,000 jobs it is better than the Wall Street consensus. While the White House may breathe a sign of relief that the numbers were not lower, one fundamental reality does not change: The deficit reduction […]
Even Wall Street today rendered an unexpectedly brutal verdict on the passage of the deficit-reduction deal signed off on by President Obama and congressional leadership. Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 265 points, falling below 12,000. The reason: "“They had to agree on fiscal contraction that would weigh on growth,” Myles Zyblock, […]
Now can we agree that there is a jobs crisis? The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an anemic number of new jobs created in May, 54,000. In other words, we’re moving backward in terms of putting Americans back to work, as indicated by the uptick in the unemployment rate, to 9.1 percent. For those who […]
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer laid out his bottom-line principles for how he believed the deficit should be addressed in a speech today before the Bipartisan Policy Institute. None of the five elements he listed address what voters say is the No. 1 economic problem: putting Americans back to work. Hoyer, in fact, didn’t even […]
It is amazing, given that we’ve been fighting a three-alarm unemployment fire with water buckets the past few months, that there is any positive news at all in the unemployment front. But there was a surprising net increase in 244,000 new jobs in April—a sliver of good news to cling to. But the context is […]
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s what we keep doing on the jobs front as long as we allow conservative budget austerity to drown out efforts to keep the jobs-producing machine revved up. The private sector generated a net increase of 230,000 jobs in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that […]
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Monday unveiled what his office called a “pro-growth economic plan” in a speech at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. If the speech only exemplified one of the basic definitions of “cant”—”insincere or almost meaningless talk used merely from convention or habit”—that would be bad enough. But this speech was worse […]
This headline in The Washington Post earlier this week—House Republicans try to steer focus back to jobs—(after guess who took the focus off of jobs) highlights how silly the silly season has gotten for the right in Washington, but it also is a sign that even the people promoting the budget-slasher drama in Washington know […]
VIDEO Rep. Keith Ellison discusses his plan for a “jobs and economic justice tour” in cities nationwide. The Progressive Caucus is launching a “jobs and economic justice” tour around the country, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., announced at the Summit on Jobs and America’s Future. The tour is designed to promote an alternative to the “so […]