Today, Vice President Biden and six Congressional leaders from both parties will convene to try and break the impasse over a deficit-reduction deal for July. New urgency for an agreement has been fueled by two disheartening developments:
President Obama’s top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, has decided to resign less than a year after he became chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. The announcement comes just days after the government revealed the nation’s official unemployment rate has jumped back up to 9.1 percent. The nation is facing its worst unemployment slump since the 1930s. CBS News reports about 6.2 million Americans—45 percent of all unemployed workers in the country—have been jobless for more than six months, a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.
Around 24 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed (the latter in part-time jobs that average $19,000, half the median wage). If these people don’t find jobs soon, they will lose skills and work habits and become permanently unemployable, with grim consequences for their families, communities and the country…We still seem to be hoping that somehow this problem will resolve itself, but it won’t. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained this week that the economy has gone through the worst financial crisis and the deepest housing collapse since the Great Depression. In fact, the problem is even worse. Employment growth has been stalled since 2000. If not for the housing and credit bubble, this jobs crisis would have revealed itself much earlier.
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