This piece in the Boston Herald shows that the Republicans think they have a winner in the weak job numbers just announced.
The Job Numbers Don't Lie
Of course they do.
If he can. If he has the knowledge, The President needs to take the fight to the Republicans.
He needs to educate and the electorate rather than pander to it.
Republicans cynically used appeals to "fiscal responsibility" to cut state aid that they knew would lead to a decrease in public employment and employment by businesses where the laid off workers shop. The created much of the unemployment in the last year.
He needs to hammer the point over and over again.
Republicans deliberately created unemployment when they cut state block grants.
Republican arguments are based on a deliberate confusion in the public mind between personal kitchen table economics where you can’t spend the money twice and don’t have a legal printing press in the basement, and the macro economics of a country where both the banks and the government can and MUST create money out of thin air, (because if the equation is money/production, if the money is fixed every additional unit of production is worth less unless the money supply grows) AND every dollar that one person spends becomes a dollar someone earns, thus money has a multiplier effect.
President Obama needs to talk about jobs. He needs to explain how public sector jobs have been slashed by Republican spending cuts at the same time that private sector jobs have grown . He needs to explain that it is hard to have net job growth while the Republicans are refusing to give the block grants to the states to fund sewage treatment plants, sewers, bridges and roads. He needs to explain how business can not hire because they do not have revenue because they do not have enough CUSTOMERS that have money to buy.
He needs to explain how money is created in this economy, via the bank making a loan or the federal government printing money to bring these projects into existence. He needs to explain that if there is no money creation there is either no growth, deflation or recession. He needs to explain that the states cannot print money or run a deficit (actually they could via the same fractional reserve lending that the banks use if they extablished a state bank like the Bank of North Dakota, but by and large they ignore the possibility).
He needs to acknowledge the dance between letting too much money be printed (private lending to commodity speculators) and too little money paid for work into the hands of the wider populous (contraction, recession, depression). He needs to explain that a job is a job, a bridge is a bridge, a teacher is a teacher, weather in private employment or pubic employment. They do the job or the need is not met. Except if the job is done by a private utility, as say a toll road, we pay an additional rent to additional administrators and the utility investors on top of what we would pay for the product as a public utility.
He needs to explain the country is NOT a kitchen table, and if we try to treat it like one, we won't have a kitchen table to our names.
Knock out their strongest argument (lie) and they are back to social issues and 30% of the electorate.
