Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs? Get off this phony issue of raising the debt ceiling and get to the much needed conversation of reducing the nation's unemployment crisis. Stop protecting the top 2 per cent of America's richest folks and address the plight of the 9.2 per cent of Americans who can't get a job.
Fourteen million, in round numbers — that is how many Americans are now unemployed.
The United States is in the grips of its gravest jobs crisis since Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. Lose your job, and it will take roughly nine months to find a new one. That is off the charts. Many Americans have simply given up.
But unless you’re one of those unhappy 14 million, you might not even notice the problem. The budget deficit, not jobs, has been dominating the conversation in Washington. Unlike the hard-pressed in, say, Greece or Spain, the jobless in America seem, well, subdued. The old fire has gone out.
In some ways, this boils down to math, both economic and political. Yes, 9.2 percent of the American work force is unemployed — but 90.8 percent of it is working. To elected officials, the unemployed are a relatively small constituency. And with apologies to Karl Marx, the workers of the world, particularly the unemployed, are also no longer uniting.
Nor are they voting — or at least not as much as people with jobs. In 2010, some 46 percent of working Americans who were eligible to vote did so, compared with 35 percent of the unemployed, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. There was a similar turnout gap in the 2008 election.
No wonder policy makers don’t fear unemployed Americans. The jobless are, politically speaking, more or less invisible.
Source: NYTimes
No comments:
Post a Comment