From Reich:
What happens next November depends both on the extent of joblessness and the direction the economy is moving in. The usual political rule is voters pay more attention to the latter. They’ll forgive even relatively high unemployment if they’re confident the economy is improving. But that old rule hasn’t been tested under conditions of extremely high unemployment. If next November one in five Americans is still unemployed or underemployed or working at lower pay than before the Great Recession, voters may not care that the economy is showing signs of improvement. They’ll vote the rascals out.
Yet when it comes to doing more about the jobs crisis, Obama and the Dems are in a box. The only sure-fire way to get jobs back is for them to do more deficit spending. After all, consumers are still in no mood to spend, businesses won’t invest without consumers to buy the fruits of such investments, and exports are still in the tank. Government remains the purchaser of last resort. (And for those of you still unconvinced, focus on the ratio of debt to GDP, and know that it won’t improve until the denominator of that equation — the GDP — starts growing quickly again, which won’t happen until there’s sufficient overall demand.)
They NEED to ACT like Democrats, not like Wall Street shills.
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