Which Way Do We Go? ‘Obama Recession’ or Full Employment?

by Dr. MARGARET FLOWERS AND KEVIN ZEESE


There are lots of interesting economic stories in the last week, but we want to focus your attention on two topics. One shows the only path out of the economic collapse. The other shows the direction that will most assuredly take us into deeper collapse. So far, the bi-partisans in Washington, DC are on the path to an ‘Obama Recession.’

First, the wrong path: austerity. Great Britain has shown the world what austerity will bring – deeper recession. Britain may be going into its third economic collapse in four years with a 0.3% decline in its GDP in the last quarter and its worst year for manufacturing on record. David Cameron was elected on the promise of austerity and he delivered. The result is Britain has the worst economy on record dating back to 1830. That’s right, since the before the reign of Queen Victoria!

Our policy makers could learn the same thing from U.S. history. When FDR came to power, he put in place stimulus programs that directly created jobs. He built a lot of infrastructure that is still with us today employing people in useful work as government employees. In 1936, FDR and Congress thought they had gotten the economy going and started worrying about deficit spending. They decided to cut the funding of the New Deal to decrease the deficit. The result: the Roosevelt Recession of 1937 and 1938. Roosevelt realized his error and started stimulating the economy again and quickly the recession ended and growth returned. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor the U.S. economy was on the mend.

Lesson to President Obama: Pursue the path of cutting the deficit with cuts to human needs and you are risking an “Obama Recession.” You will have squandered an immense opportunity to get the country on track.

Second, what is the solution to end the economic collapse?  There is one thing that has paralleled deficit spending for decades.  When deficit spending goes up, this is always is going up; and when deficit spending goes down, this has reversed.  As the chart below shows that one thing is unemployment.  If unemployment is high, deficit as a percent of GDP is high. If we reduce unemployment, the deficit shrinks.

Chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows the deficit as a percentage of GDP (red line) vs. the unemployment rate (blue line); for 60 years the pattern has held. When unemployment drops, the deficit as a percentage of GDP drops. When unemployment rises, the deficit rises.

Jobs.  Job creation is the one solution that has not been tried by government. Jobs are the solution to so many economic problems. The deficit, which the bi-partisans in Washington are fixated on, is directly related and the only path to reducing the deficit is moving toward full employment.  Full employment solves so many other problems: poverty and hunger, eviction and foreclosure, personal debt, retirement savings – all are ameliorated by full employment. But, when was the last time you heard any elected official utter the phrase “full employment”?

Other News
There is a lot of news for you to review in our news section which is updated daily: how Geithner left the banking system more concentrated with already too big to fail banks growing bigger and how the solution is public banks or turning banks into utilities; Obama’s appointment to the SEC brings Morgan Stanley’s lawyer through the DC revolving door; reports from Davos show complacency and denial; the continued, precipitous decline of unions while non-union workers organize; the energy mess of tar sands, fracking and worse signs for climate change while billionaires continue to mislead on climate; how single payer is becoming more essential than ever; details on how tax havens operate and how a resignation of a top DOJ official shows there never was any serious effort to investigate or prosecute bankers who collapsed the economy.

Finally, don’t miss two other articles we’ve written: Margaret Flowers wrote in Al Jazeera how top CEOs are planning to loot the economy; and Margaret and Kevin Zeese wrote a must read hidden history of cooperatives and community work and how they relate to social change for Truthout. This history provides lots of clues as to how we can be more effective today.

Inaction by Congress Deepens the Jobs Crisis

By Zach Carter, The Media Consortium
July 7, 2010

After months of modest gains, the U.S. economy lost 125,000 jobs during June. That’s the worst jobs-related news this year. Without serious action soon, the struggling U.S. economy is going to get even uglier. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama’s economic team was slow to recognize the severity of the jobs crisis, and now seems unable to get Congress to actually do something about it.

As David Corn notes for Mother Jones, the recent jobs data is actually much worse than the 125,000 figure implies:

“The economy needs about 150,000 new jobs a month to keep up with population growth and new entries into the jobs market. It needs a lot more than that to make up for the 8 million or so jobs lost in 2008 and 2009.”

Recession 2.0

Although the economy sluggishly recovered from the catastrophic events of late 2008, economists are warning of a “double-dip” recession in which mass layoffs return. So why is Congress refusing to deal with the jobs crisis in the face of such terrible economic conditions?

Part of the problem, Corn notes, is that Obama didn’t do a very good job selling his economic stimulus package to the public. The bill, which Obama pushed through in early 2009, really did improve the economy—it’s the only reason why the unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent instead of 12 percent or 13 percent. But by refusing to counter Republican attacks on so-called “wasteful spending” included in the package, Obama failed to show the public how much good the stimulus has done. Instead, the bill is widely perceived as another wasteful giveaway to special interests and akin to the bank bailout.

Spending is stimulus

In reality, government spending is the best way to stimulate the economy during a deep recession. It makes up for the shortfall in spending from consumers who have lost their jobs.

There are all kinds of ways the federal government can spend money to create jobs, including extending unemployment benefits to laid-off workers, providing funding to states to allow them to hire more teachers and cops, and hiring people to build roads and buildings. The government did all of these things with the stimulus package from early 2009, but it didn’t do enough of any of them. The stimulus package was simply spread to thin.

Roots of recession

As Robert Reich explains for The Nation, the recession itself was created by deep economic inequality. By 2007, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans made 23.5 percent of the nation’s total income. Figures like that had not been seen since 1929, when the richest 1 percent made 23.9 percent of the nation’s total wealth. All of this concentration at the top means that the elite enjoy a disproportionate share of economic gains, but it also sets the entire economy up for massive shocks.

When the rich have all of that money, they have to invest it somewhere. When the majority of citizens are seeing sluggish wage growth, or even a drop in wages, as the U.S. experienced during the Bush years, there aren’t enough valuable assets out there that can absorb that investment. As a result, rich people put their money in speculative asset bubbles. When those bubbles burst, the entire economy can come crashing down, as it did in both 1929 and 2008.

Rampant inequalities around the globe

As Melinda Burns highlights for AlterNet, rampant inequality in not unique to the U.S. More than half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day, and decades of conservative economic policies have been unable to reverse that hardship.

One of the best ways to relieve global poverty is also one of the most intuitive—give money to the poor. Brazil has made an aggressive push to cope with widespread poverty by providing $31 billion in pensions and grants to the poor every year. As a result, the nation’s poverty rate has declined from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2008, while child malnutrition was cut in half. These policies make good economic sense. When poor people have money to spend, they spend it and fuel growth that benefits the entire economy.

Social insecurity

And yet in the U.S., Obama is seriously considering cutting Social Security in order to reduce the federal budget deficit. As Margaret Smith emphasizes for In These Times, Obama has created a bipartisan “debt commission,” and packed it full of ideologues from both political parties who have been fighting for years to slash Social Security.

This doesn’t really make sense, because Social Security is funded by its own dedicated tax revenue, and is sitting on a multi-trillion-dollar surplus created by those taxes. It really can’t do much to reduce the deficit. With interest rates at record lows, lawmakers do not currently have any reason to be worried about the deficit. But if they wanted to take action on it, they’d have to deal with long-term issues like the rising cost of health care, the bloated defense budget and absurdly low tax rates on the rich. Cutting off income for senior citizens won’t help.

Blocking economic stimulus won’t help

And neither will efforts to block short-term economic stimulus. But Obama’s emphasis on the budget deficit plays into the hands of Congressional opportunists who want to block his economic recovery efforts. If we’re told over and over again that the real economic problem is the budget deficit, no money is going to be dedicated to problems like jobs—even if that money would actually help the government’s fiscal position by fueling economic growth.

The American economy is in the middle of an absolute employment crisis. Without strong federal action, it’s going to get worse.