Bob Herbert is Back

…and he’s writing for The Policy Shop, the in-house blog of the DEMOS group. His piece there is called The Jobs Emergency and America in Crisis:

The average length of unemployment is a devastating 40 weeks, the longest since 1948, which was the first year such records were kept. Unemployed workers 55 and older are gripped with the very real fear that they may never work again.

Policymakers in Washington are behaving as if none of this is going on. President Obama referred to May’s execrable jobs numbers as a bump in the road. Republicans and Democrats alike are counseling austerity, which is like weakening the water pressure of firefighters trying to contain a conflagration. America’s leaders seem to have lost sight of the fundamental importance of employment – not just to the personal well-being of individuals and families, but as an absolutely crucial component of a healthy economy.

Here’s a one-two punch to consider: the college graduating class of 2011 has the highest average student debt load in history and is facing the worst employment market on record for graduates with a four-year degree. Young men and women are coming out of college and, increasingly, moving back home with mom and dad. Many are taking unpaid internships, doing volunteer work or otherwise biding their time in the hope that the employment landscape improves. Those who have jobs are often underemployed. Fewer than half of recent college graduates are working in jobs that require a college degree.

For young people with less than a college degree, forget about it. Fewer than half have any jobs at all. Many are outside the labor force, not even bothering to look for the jobs that are not there.

What we have on our hands is a catastrophe. The economy has proved incapable of generating enough jobs for those who want and desperately need to work. The few jobs that are being created are mostly low-paying and part-time, with few or no benefits.

What is bizarre is the extent to which politicians have turned their backs on this issue, yammering incessantly (and ineffectively) about budget-cutting and fiscal responsibility while doing nothing, absolutely nothing, about jobs.

He’s right on all counts. Go over and read the whole thing.

Couple that with the fact that the WH still doesn’t quite get what is wrong with the economy — they are discussing an employer-side payroll tax reduction — it isn’t looking for for the economy and nor is Team Obama doing itself any re-election favors here. A consumer economy needs consumers — when demand goes up, employers will hire. The uncertainty is NOT in the business community as much as it is within the middle class, who wake up every day wondering if they are *still* in the middle class. With falling home equity, continued deleveraging, rising prices for the basics, government cost shifting and employment uncertainty, the lack of market confidence is utterly among those who are expected to fuel this economy. Add to that the fact that our political class is captured by this debt business which hasn’t one damn thing to do with the current state of our economy, it doesn’t look like anything will change for a really long time.