Unemployment: a Political Mechanism

Abortion, right-to-life issues, Terri Schiavo, and same sex marriage: these are all political mechanisms that bloggers, pundits, and poorly informed law makers have used to further their own agendas and biases. Now we turn to the recessionary economy, and more importantly the unemployed. Scanning the blogosphere, there is a sense that the most to gain from some stimulus plan put forward by a presidential administration are trapped by these same discordant, self-serving politicos that use shallow bickering as poor substitute for true analysis. Now I am no detractor or supporter of President-elect Obama.

Yet some are comparing his "proposed" stimulus plan to the FDR and his New Deal. I put proposed in quotation marks to stress that it is just that, a proposition. A proposition for the unemployed. There have been reams and reams of space taken up on how this stimulus plan may or may not work. Now the price tag, 600 billion to 775 billion, is enormous burden considering that United States is already in debt. Yet, instead of giving the incoming administration time to clarify and to compromise with other law makers on this particular plan, bloggers have already written it off. Some comparing it unfavorably to the New Deal and how that the money used in that era had been abused for political gain.

I have no doubt that this may happen. In our desperate climate, we may see States with their hands out, and salivating at the opportunity to get some for themselves. But the opposition in Washington has not been crushed. Republications, licking their wounds, still have enough power to sway what may go into this stimulus bill for the unemployed. And to my confusion I see some bloggers use World War II as to disqualify FDR and what he did to raise this nation out of the Great Depression, and thus predict the downfall of Obama's stimulus plan by doing so. It may be true that WWII produced massive jobs, and unemployment was at the lowest, perhaps, never seen before or since. Yet look at the facts. In the midst of the Great Depression, 1933, unemployment reached a staggering 24.9%.

A very daunting number! By 1940 the unemployment rate in the United States was cut in half to 14.6%. Now I am no economist, but what that says to me is: FDR was doing something right. WWII stimulated the economy even more, however, this sharp downturn in unemployment by the 1940s before the world war even started should be taken into account. Such bloggish rambling should be disturbing. In such dire times, most economists believe that we are heading for a 8 or 9 percent unemployment in 2009, something has to be done. Notice that I called this a stimulus plan for the unemployed. It is more than that.

Apparently it is also set up to help the States deep in the red, and the housing market. But doesn't that unavoidably lead to those unemployed? I propose that those sinking us lower, and dividing us with poor analysis, are not bring America together. Instead of constructive criticism, there are those using the economy and to a large extent, unemployment, as just another political mechanism to foster their selfish needs. They commit themselves to careless prose that you now see throughout the Internet.