Jobs: the key to a recovery

Job growth and wage growth should be the central focus of economic policy, not deficit reduction,?Reich writes.

By Robert Reich,?Guest blogger / January 4, 2013

In this December 2012 photo a job seeker leaves his contact information with a potential employer during a job fair in New York. We?re a very long way from the job growth we need to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession, Reich writes.

Mary Altaffer/AP/File

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The news today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is that the U.S. job market is treading water.

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Robert is chancellor?s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Clinton. Time Magazine?named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including ?The Work of Nations,? his latest best-seller ?Aftershock: The Next Economy and America?s Future," and a new?e-book, ?Beyond Outrage.??He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

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The number of new jobs created in December (155,000), and percent unemployment (7.8), were the same as the revised numbers for November.

Also, about the same number of people are looking for work (12.2 million), with additional millions too discouraged even to look.

Put simply, we?re a very long way from the job growth we need to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. That would be at least 300,000 new jobs per month.

All of which means job growth and wage growth should be the central focus of economic policy, not deficit reduction.?

Yet all we?re hearing from Washington ? and all we?re likely to hear as Republicans and Democrats negotiate over raising the debt ceiling ? is how to cut the deficit.

The typical American worker?s paycheck will drop this week because his or her Social Security tax will rise, from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent. That?s nonsensical.

We need to put more money into the pockets of average workers, not less. The first $25,000 of income should be exempt from Social Security taxes altogether, and we should make up the difference by eliminating the ceiling on income subject to Social Security taxes.?

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. This post originally ran on www.robertreich.org.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Jh3rhuBf5E4/Jobs-the-key-to-a-recovery

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