According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States created a net total of zero jobs in August. The 17,000 jobs that were added in the private sector were offset by the 17,000 jobs that were lost in the public sector—which, as Kevin Drum notes, means we actually had negative job growth because the population continued to grow.
So what’s to be done about all this? Kevin has some ideas for what Obama should do if he were a dictator (a $1 trillion investment in our crumbling infrastructure), but as has become pretty clear to everyone but this guy, Obama is not a dictator. Congress, meanwhile, is set to embark on another lengthy debate about reining in the deficit and “living within our means,” in the form of a bi-partisan “Super Committee.” On Friday, Ezra Klein suggested a way out of the mess we’re in:
[T]he supercommittee has a design flaw: it’s directed to return recommendations on deficit reduction, but not job creation. That doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective and it doesn’t make sense from a political perspective. If the supercommittee succeeds and a deficit-reduction package passes Congress, Washington will have nevertheless failed to make any progress on the issue that economists consider most important in the near-term and that the American people have named, in poll after poll, as their top priority.
Rep. John Larson is introducing a bill to add a jobs component to the supercommittee’s mandate. His legislation suggests three possible ways of doing so: either the existing supercommittee should commit to returning recommendations on jobs, or it should add four new members and create a subsupercommittee on jobs, or it should create a parallel supercommittee on jobs. In all cases, Larson says, failure to return and pass job-creation legislation would mean the trigger goes off.
Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, has since introduced his bill. But even if it does gain traction, I’m not totally sure I share Ezra’s optimism that anything will come of it. That’s because Congressional Republicans’ ideas for job creation are more or less the opposite of Larson’s (or Kevin’s, for that matter)—if you listen to Paul Ryan and his fellow GOPers, you’ll realize that slashing government spending is their job creation strategy.
