Labor-backed think tank: Second big stimulus needed to ease worst crash since 1929

[Omaha Steve]

http://transitional.pww.org/article/view/16274/

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/06/09 15:12

A top economist at the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute said today that this month’s jobless figures and other economic indicators show the “urgent need” for “a second stimulus package as large as or even bigger than” the $700 billion Economic Recovery Act passed in the opening weeks of the Obama administration.

“The current economic crash, now in its 18th month, is by far the longest and worst we have seen since the Great Depression. Any hope we had when we saw May figures that looked a little less horrible than the 600,000 per month job losses we had been seeing have been dashed by what we see now,” Heidi Shierholz, co-author of a devastating economic report EPI issued last month, said in a phone interview.

In June, the official unemployment rate surged to 9.5 percent.

“There is no way that unemployment is not going to pass double-digit figures and we can only hope that it doesn’t pass the benchmark of 10.8 percent, which would be the worst in history since the Great Depression,” she said.

Shierholz said “the housing bubble was the root cause of the recession, aided and abetted by what went on in the financial markets.”

Unions have described the recession, which began in December 2007, as the result of the policies of President George W. Bush and the financial kingpins who pushed for those policies.

Vice President Joe Biden said this week the crisis is even worse than most in the current administration had originally thought.

FULL story at link.

[WillowTree]

1. Where's the money going to come from?

And who is it going to GO TO?

They haven't spent most of the first $700M yet. How about we deplete that first?

And if they do go for another stim, it would be nice if they actually gave it a little thought this time around.

Oh.......and I wouldn't mind a little bit of that transparency we were promised rather than doing it all behind closed doors and we don't get to know what's in it or how much is going to whom until after the fact. Yes, I would like that much better.

[defendandprotect]

3. Stop the wars . . . cut the military budget which Bush increased by 40%+++

[defendandprotect]

2. Why cash? And why not creating jobs? Conflict is obvious ....!!!!