Populist movements don't build themselves ...

... It doesn't matter what the "horse race" outcome of the campaign is, if we fight the campaign. Fighting it, we learn how to fight. Learning how to fight political battles, we become citizens again. Becoming citizens again, we reclaim the Republic that lies dormant beneath the bread and circuses of modern American society.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Sunday Train: Strengthening the Jobs Bill with a $0.01/gallon Oil Tariff

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Yeah, OK, its not Sunday, but I got called on Saturday morning after a Friday night class to substitute for a colleague, and that threw me off completely. Fortunately for the Sunday Train, I am massively underemployed, so there is Monday afternoon available to finish composing what I been thinking about this week.

As I discussed in Whether and How to Sell the Jobs Policy, there is not a whole lot of "pop" in the jobs bill, but there is some. The EPI analysis suggests 1m in jobs "created or saved", but of course "jobs saved" is an increase compared to a counterfactual, and not an actual increase. Over half of those are "job saved", so the "pop" is under half a million jobs.

If spread evenly across a calendar year, "just under half a million new jobs" would be 40,000 new jobs per month. If 150,000 new jobs per month is needed to bring unemployment down, that is relying on our stuttering economy to create 110,000 or more ~ close to what we have often been achieving, but there is substantial concern that we might not keep it up, after a month with about 0 (zero, zilch, nada) new private jobs created.

So the aim here is to look for something that can add some more "pop". And having read the title, you know that a 1 penny Oil Tariff is involved. Hopefully raising the question in our mind: "uhmmm, where's the 'pop' in that?"

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More at:

ProgressiveBlue
The Stars Hollow Gazette
HillbillyReport.org
and Agent Orange

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Whether and How to Sell the Jobs Policy

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

First off, the thing to do with the BS about gutting the safety net on the excuse that the Take Everything Away Party wants to kill it is to take the idea of gutting the safety programs behind the farmhouse to the mint bed and apply a sharp ax.

How to do that, I don't know.

But if it can be done, then there's still the question of whether and how to sell the "Jobs Policy"
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More at:
ProgressiveBlue
The Stars Hollow Gazette
HillbillyReport.org
Docudharma