Feb 23 2010

How To Create 18 Million Jobs

Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).  His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the US and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

Here Pollin talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network and outlines a careful combination of job-generating public investments, incentives to mobilize private investment, and policies that protect economically vulnerable populations that can create the economic and policy environment that Obama could use to create 18 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate to only 4 percent by 2012.

Transcript here, and there is also a companion article to this by Pollin in the March 08, 2010 edition of The Nation.

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    • Edger on February 23, 2010 at 14:48
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    he first has to want to.

  2. …private borrowing by businesses over the previous six months was down by $1.5 trillion relative to 2007.

    Obama’s tiny “jobs program” is just a drop in a very big bucket.

    California’s budget is in a deep ditch, with an eye-popping 56 percent gap between expected revenues and spending commitments.

    This is part of the legacy of Prop 13, pure democracy as a ballot initiative, populism at its finest, and if “the people” want to turn California into a wasteland, then nobody can stop them.

    In 2007 banks were holding only $21 billion in cash reserves. But increasing reserves from $21 billion to $850 billion in little more than a year is a new form of Wall Street excess.

    And where did the banks get all that money which now they hoard at the Federal Reserve?

    From you and me, brother.

    From you and me.

  3. All I have heard here is throw money at the issue. I have not heard anything about job creation.

    There is too much money being made by undermining capital investment and has been that way for decades.  

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