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Recession’s Lost Wages Cost More than Health Care Reform |
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Here’s a stunning fact that points both to the need for Washington lawmakers to rapidly move on massive job creation and pass health care reform:
The wages lost as a result of the 2008-2012 recession will top $1 trillion—more than the estimated 10-year cost of health care reform. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates unemployment at more than 7 percent in 2012.
Last year, in fact, the United States spent $2.3 trillion on health care—$7,681 per person, a far larger per-person cost than in western European nations where everyone actually gets health coverage (unlike the 47 million Americans here who don’t.) Yet opponents of health care reform and foes of a public-sector role in job creation continue to harp on the long-discredited theory that the private sector will come to the rescue of our nation’s ills. As Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), points out:
For conservatives to insist that we now rely only on the private sector for economic recovery is a bit like Bernie Madoff starting a new mutual fund from prison with the slogan, “Trust me.”
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by OrlinBowman: AFL-CIO Ludites focus on “Lost Wages” more than “Health Care.” Is the AFL-CIO Real? (But want no Taxes )Here: http://tinyurl.com/yjnfcyj...
That Mark Weisbrot sounds like a smart fella.
Unemployed workers sit at home and fret alone. Employed workers are concentrated and can see that their only power lies in their numbers, so they are infinitely easier to organize. Once employment picks up – even if it is almost all non-union jobs, the possibilities open up for the massive organizing campaigns, the strikes and mass actions, indeed, the mass movement of organized and unorganized workers necessary for decades of decline in our real wages and our social wage to be stopped and reversed. In the thirties, the AFL was not up to the job, so the CIO was brought forth. The question remains, will today’s AFL-CIO be capable of leading this upsurge, or will the workers once again have to create new forms to lead this massive struggle. The alternative is oblivion.
2008-2012? We are only 9 days into 2010. How does Tula know the recession will last until 2012?