There was some good sense being made in the pages of the nation's newspapers over the weekend. One example could be found on the editorial page of the New York Times, which explained why extended unemployment benefits need to be a part of any stimulus package:
The most pressing data in the latest jobs report is this: The number of people who were unemployed for six months or more as of January was 1.38 million.
The last time the numbers looked that bad — when the nation was mired in joblessness after the 2001 recession — Congress extended unemployment compensation for people who had exhausted their initial 13 weeks of benefits. This time around, unfortunately, Congress may fail to include those much needed benefits in the upcoming economic stimulus bill....
The bad news does not stop there. Fewer jobs coupled with rising unemployment means that many people who are already out of work will stay unemployed longer, and that many more will soon join their ranks.
Knowing that, refusing to extend unemployment benefits is both unconscionable and poor economic policy.
And in the Washington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about how working people have been feeling economically pinched for years, even if the chattering classes haven't felt the pinch until now:
[H]ellooo, we've had brisk growth for the past few years, as the president has tirelessly reminded us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the poor and the middle class. According to a study just released by the Economic Policy Institute, real wages actually fell last year. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been "decoupled" from widely shared prosperity.
I first began to sense this in the boom years of the late 1990s, when I was working in entry-level jobs for my book "Nickel and Dimed." While the stock market soared and fortunes were being made in the time it takes to say "IPO," my $6-to-$8-an-hour co-workers lunched on hot dog buns because that was all they could afford and, in some cases, fretted about whether they could find a safe place to sleep...
So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And -- far removed from whatever happens on Wall Street, the Nikkei, Dax, or the curiously named FTSE -- most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years.
