The Work's Cut out for America

With unemployment above 9 percent, the average workweek shrinking and hourly income stagnant, American workers had ample reason to question if they had much to celebrate this past Labor Day.

Friday brought the release of another dismal employment report: no net gain in the number of jobs in August and fewer jobs created in June and July than originally announced.

More than 25 million Americans are either unemployed, forced to work part time when they desire full-time jobs or have stopped looking for work altogether. That total, sometimes referred to as the true unemployment rate, accounts for 16.4 percent of the American workforce.

Conditions are undeniably bad nationwide. And until businesses begin to hire in much greater numbers, the economy won't improve substantially, a fact that leaves millions of fully employed Americans living with fear and uncertainty.

Given that tough reality, Congress and the president should clearly understand the priorities before them.

But that's not the case.

Last week, the White House and Congress were in a short-lived but embarrassing stalemate over which night President Obama would deliver his much-anticipated speech about a new job creation plan. The pettiness of that dispute underscores just how difficult it will be to do anything of substance.

Any president normally would have a difficult path to re-election with unemployment hovering around 9 percent. But Republican presidential challengers and their GOP colleagues in Congress also have much to lose, because their political base is demanding action on the nation's soaring deficit. Significantly reducing that deficit will be virtually impossible without healthy economic growth.

So even if the White House and Congress won't work together for the good of the nation, they have a strong incentive to find common ground in order to save jobs — their own.

REPRINTED FROM THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR

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