Former Secretary of Labor to speak at UI on Sept. 7
By John Kenyon
IOWA CITY – President Barack Obama should use the bully pulpit of his office to propose a bold jobs plan next week, according to Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
Mr. Reich, however, doesn’t sound optimistic about the chance of that happening.
“He has shown himself capable of a degree of boldness,” he said. “But he also seems to be of the continuing view that Republicans will compromise. They have shown absolutely no sign of compromising on almost any issue since he became president.”
Mr. Reich said that the initiatives floated by the Obama Administration thus far are not sufficient to address the unemployment situation in the country. The proposals might add 1million jobs, but there are 25 million people who are looking for full-time work, he said.
“I hope the president surprises,” he said by phone from his office at the University of California, Berkeley. “I hope he comes up with something commensurate to the size of the crisis we face. This is not a time for small-bore solutions, even if they are small steps in the right direction. Extending the modest Social Security tax cut is a good idea. Extending unemployment benefits is worthwhile, providing employers with a tax incentive to hire net additional employees makes some sense. But none of this is large enough to have a significant effect.”
Mr. Reich will be in Iowa City on Sept. 7 to give the University of Iowa’s 2011-12 Distinguished Lecture at 7:30 p.m. in the main lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union.
Mr. Reich’s speech, “The Next Economy and America’s Future,” is presented by the UI Lecture Committee and is part of the UI Public Policy Center’s Forkenbrock Series on Public Policy.
He will be signing copies of his latest book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future.
Mr. Reich is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton.
He said that he understands as well as anyone, given his experience, that it is difficult to get anything done in Washington, D.C. But he said Mr. Obama is uniquely positioned to drive policy.
“The bully pulpit is the most effective weapon a president has,” he said. “Indeed, he is the only one with it. It’s his national megaphone. Whatever he says, is amplified across the nation in a way that nobody else’s voice is amplified. If he puts forward a bold jobs plan, he might be able to sell it to the American people, even if Republicans initially refuse to go along.”
Mr. Reich has proposed his own bold plan, outlined in a post on his blog. It includes exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for two years and making up shortfall by raising ceiling on income subject to payroll taxes, and recreating the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps to put long-term unemployed directly to work.
As the debate about the debt ceiling and tax rates continues to unfold, some have stated that the country should return to the tax rates and policies from the time of President Bill Clinton. Mr. Reich said he finds that sentiment amusing, noting that Mr. Clinton did not accomplish many of the things he set out to do like health-care reform, infrastructure investment and a push to improve education.
“We didn’t face what the Obama Administration has faced,” he said. “The bursting of the asset bubbles like debt and housing. We were emerging from a garden variety recession brought about by the Fed raising rates too high to ward off inflation, and we could bounce back aggressively with Fed rate changes.”
He likens today’s challenges to those experienced in 1929 with the Great Depression when the country also experienced a huge collapse of a giant debt structure.
Despite the current economic problems plaguing the country, Mr. Reich said he is optimistic. To a degree.
“I’m an optimist, eternally, about the country’s ability to roll up our sleeves and get on with what needs to be done when we understand the problem,” he said. “My worry is that we’re not focused on the problem.”
