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Congress has finally taken action to address the jobs crisis, but the $15 billion jobs bill passed by the Senate and the House is not nearly enough. The bill, which would give employers tax breaks for new hires, is likely to create only a couple of hundred thousand jobs at a time that the country needs 11 million jobs just to return to pre-recession levels of employment.

High unemployment could last for years

EPI President Lawrence Mishel emphasized the magnitude of the jobs crisis and the size of the response needed during a February 23 testimony to the House Committee on Financial Services. Mishel warned that unless Congress acted quickly and at a sufficient scale, “high and damaging unemployment will continue for years.”

The Senate bill is less than one-tenth the size of the $174 billion jobs bill that the House of Representatives passed last year, which itself fell far short of President Obama’s proposal to invest $267 billion to put people back to work. EPI’s American Jobs Plan proposes spending $400 billion to create 4.6 million jobs in one year.

One key problem with the Senate’s response to the jobs crisis is that its last-minute extension of unemployment benefits for millions of long-term unemployed is only a 30-day extension. By the end of March, 200,000 workers will begin losing benefits each week. EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey issued a statement criticizing the Senate for failing to extend these badly needed benefits for the rest of 2010. The unemployed workers waiting on Congress, Eisenbrey said, had “lost their jobs not through any fault of their own, but because of the worst economic crisis in 70 years. Now they are unable to work because there are more than six job seekers for every job opening.”

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The Mission of EPI

To inform and empower people to seek solutions that will ensure broadly shared prosperity and opportunity.

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