The Wake

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has managed to get both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate to pass his new job bill, which will spend $15 billion on creating new jobs.

Mark Zandi, an economist and former presidential campaign advisor to John McCain, estimates 250,000 new jobs might result from the bill. Though at first that might sound like a reasonable number, it’s only around 3 percent of the jobs that have been lost since the economy became anorexic.

Part of the bill would give hiring businesses a tax break until next year, freeing them from shelling out Social Security tax for any new hires that were previously unemployed. If the companies keep any of these new workers for a year, they can also rack up $1,000 per employee in tax credit.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass, has made headlines through his promotion and support of the bill. But even he admits that the bill has some problems.

The bill would benefit from “deeper and broader” tax cuts, Brown said.

The U.S. unemployment rate is currently hovering around 10 percent. This last year has seen the highest unemployment rates in the last 20 years. Clearly, a reduction of 3 percent is not acceptable.
If the government has to spend $15 billion to fix 3 percent of a problem, no wonder the country’s in a deficit.

The bill would be great for the 3 percent of unemployed workers who benefit, but it’s not going to mean anything to the remaining 97 percent still out of jobs. Should taxpayers’ money really be going towards a bill that will make so little of a dent? What we need is something that will generate new fields of jobs. We need a bill that will kick the economy back into shape.

Here’s the simple math. Around 8.4 million people have lost their job since the economy went south. Even with the passing of this new bill, only 250,000 of those people are going to be earning a living again. That still leaves over 8 million of those recently unemployed still jobless.

It’s wonderful that bipartisan forces are working together on a bill. But it would be even better if Republicans and Democrats could pull their best talent together and come up with a more effective bill.
Some of Reid’s Republican opponents criticized him for not allowing amendments to be made to the bill. They have a point. Since the bill has been quasi-popular on both sides of the political table, it seems Reid has been provided with a good opportunity to tap talent from Democrats and Republicans. He should at least be open to hearing suggestions, which could possibly help the measure have a greater impact on reducing unemployment. Reid can hardly snub his nose at the idea of amendments, unless he thinks he can improve a system that has worked successfully for one of the founding documents of our government - the U.S. Constitution – for over 200 years.