Showing all posts tagged: jobs
Catharine Rampell via NYTimes.com
The share of working-age Americans who are either working or actively looking for a job is now at its lowest level since 1981, when far fewer women chose to do paid work. The share of men taking part in the labor force fell in April to 70 percent, the lowest figure since the Labor Department began collecting these data in 1948.
There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.
That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.
Senate Republicans filibustered the president’s full jobs act last month for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year’s presidential election.
…Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, bitterly accused Democrats of designing their infrastructure bill to fail by paying for it with a millionaire’s tax, as if his party’s intransigence was so indomitable that daring to challenge it is somehow underhanded.
The only good news is that the Democrats aren’t going to stop. There are many more jobs bills to come, including extension of unemployment insurance and the payroll-tax cut. If Republicans are so proud of blocking all progress, they will have to keep doing it over and over again, testing the patience of American voters.
The New York Times, “Putting Millionaires Before Jobs.”
Yep. Specifically, Republicans. When they fight for no tax increases, they want you to believe that they’re doing so for all income levels. Nope. Just for the wealthy. Just for the fucking One Percent.
They are actually doing it to torpedo Obama’s efforts to improve the economy. It’s political terrorism.
It’s time for a national general strike, a week long disruption of everything, to demonstrate against the insanity of our political system, the mounting inequality these idiots are defending, and the oligarchic control of our government and policies ab the 1%.
Although the American people are concerned about restoring our economy and creating jobs, today we are returning to irrelevant issues that do nothing to promote economic growth to put Americans back to work.
- Congressman Jerry Nadler, (D-NY), complaining about the GOP-sponsored bill to reaffirm ‘In God We Trust’ as the official motto of the US, the official motto for the past 55 years, and which is unchallenged at present.
(via Dana Milbank, in House Republicans, keeping the faith - The Washington Post)
We have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs, that’s what happened in Cairo, that’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here. The damage to a generation that can’t find jobs will go on for many, many years.
Mike Bloomberg (via soupsoup)
(via tedroden)
There is a crater in the economy where the job market used to be.- NY Times Editorial Board
Congressional caucus leaders want actual jobs for actual unemployed people, not tax breaks for corporations.
underpaidgenius
Last year, one in five American adults worked in jobs that paid poverty-level wages http://t.co/yykFGyb
9/6/11 10:12 AM
As I said a month ago (see Enough) we will look back on July 2011 as the start of the New Depression, when we slid over the edge from recession.
Obama has one chance left, but with the GOP calling him ‘President Zero’ I don’t know if he can convince enough Americans that we need a huge infrastructure investment.
It’s sad to think that a second hurrricane hitting the US and causing huge damage might be the only thing that could get the population behind a jobs program.
Every $1 billion invested in transport infrastructure creates between 27,800 and 34,800 jobs.
