Officials Shrug Their Shoulders
'Most congress critters clearly don’t care about America’s middle-class jobs depression. The White House cares, but doesn’t treat it as the crisis it is, so nothing happens. The only jobs push we’ve had is the stop-gap effort by the Federal Reserve to pump enough money into the economy to keep unemployment from worsening.
'But rather than push harder, Ben Bernanke, head of the central bank, recently sounded retreat. He, too, uses the faulty unemployment statistic as a crutch to claim “improvement” – the jobless rate, he says, could drop to seven percent next year, so the Fed’s stimulus will no longer be needed.
'That’s shameful. Even if that was the true rate, seven percent equals 11 million unemployed Americans and many millions more who’d still be underemployed. From Bernanke to Congress, all government officials who shrug their shoulders and give up on helping that many Americans should themselves be made jobless.'