Arianna Huffington: Band-Aids, Bipartisanship and Baby-Steps: How Not to Deal With a Jobs Crisis

Arianna Huffington: Band-Aids, Bipartisanship and Baby-Steps: How Not to Deal With a Jobs Crisis
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Less than a month ago, during his State of the Union speech, President Obama declared, "jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010." So why is there no sense of urgency coming out of Washington?

Perhaps the reason can be found in the stunning results of a study conducted by Northeastern University's Center for Labor Studies that broke down the unemployment rate by income. Unemployment for those making $150,000 a year, the study found, was only 3 percent in the last quarter of 2009. The rate for those in the middle income range was 9 percent -- not far off the national average. The rate for those in the bottom 10 percent of income was a staggering 31 percent.

These numbers, according to the Wall Street Journal's Robert Frank, "raise questions about the theory behind what is informally known as 'trickle down' economics, since full employment at the top doesn't seem to be translating into more jobs below.'"

In fact, these numbers do more than raise questions -- they also supply the answers.

Does anyone believe that the sense of urgency coming out of Washington wouldn't be wildly different if it was the unemployment rate in the top ten percent that was 31 percent? If one-third of television news producers, pundits, bankers, and lobbyists were unemployed, would the measures being proposed by the White House and Congress still be this pathetic? Of course not -- the sense of national emergency would be so great you'd practically be hearing air raid sirens howling.

Instead we get baby steps, bipartisanship, and band-aids -- timid moves that, given the seriousness of the crisis, threaten to change the very fabric of our society. For much of our history, America was known for its upward mobility -- and the promise that hard work would be rewarded with your children being able to do better than you. That promise has been called into question over the last three decades, and an extended run of high unemployment could be its death knell.

"These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution," wrote Bob Herbert. "And such gruesome gaps in the condition of groups at the top and bottom of the economic ladder are unmistakable signs of impending societal instability. This is dangerous stuff."

So dangerous, in fact, that when it comes to jobs we can't afford a repeat of the health care reform fiasco, in which the president decided to sit out the debate, emerging only to give vague statements of encouragement and cryptic pronouncements about what he actually favored (does anyone, even at this late date, have a clue what that was, by the way?).