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What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first. (WaPo)

According to Brad Plumer, if we’re serious about climate change, we need to solve the jobs crisis first: there’s a connection between a Senator’s “green score” from the League of Conservation Voters and the unemployment rate in his or her state.

As rich gain optimism, lawmakers lose economic urgency (WaPo)

Jim Tankersley reminds us that while the economy and jobs remain a top priority for most Americans, the House has only approved three bills that could be considered economic policy this year- and one of those was the 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Sequestration Nation: Budget Cuts Endanger Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Victims (CAP)

Kwame Boadi lays out the effect of sequestration on one of our most vulnerable populations: domestic violence and sexual assault victims, who are losing services, beds in shelters, and more. These cuts could kill, but Congress has prioritized keeping flights on schedule.

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs (MoJo)

Josh Harkinson breaks down yesterday’s report from the Brookings Institution, showing that the suburban poor now outnumber the urban and rural poor. With most federal anti-poverty spending targeting urban communities, there’s a serious mismatch.

Senator Introduces Bill To Allow Holders Of Student Debt To Refinance (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reports on Senator Gillibrand’s proposal to force the Department of Education to automatically refinance federal student loans with interest rates above 4 percent to fixed 4 percent loans, which would save nearly 37 million borrowers billions in interest payments.

Ready to Testify on Financial Stability, Lew Is Likely To Be Grilled on IRS Scandal (National Journal)

Catherine Hollander notes that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is scheduled to deliver the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s annual report this week, but Congress is less interested in the global financial system than it is in what’s going on at the local IRS office in Cincinnati.

The Unemployed Need Bold, Creative Moves from the Fed (The Fiscal Times)

Mark Thoma remembers when the Fed took risks and pushed the rules to their limits in orchestrating the bailout for big financial institutions. Why, he asks, aren’t they maintaining such boldness for the sake of the unemployed?

On June 4th, the Roosevelt Institute will bring together leading thinkers, activists, and policymakers for A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency: Setting the Political Agenda for 2014 and 2016, a daylong conference in Washington, D.C. that will focus on America's desperate need for more and better jobs. Recently, Cathy Harding, Roosevelt's VP of Operations and Communications, sat down with Jeff Madrick, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Rediscovering Government initiative, to discuss his goals for the conference and his thoughts on what we can and must do to address the ongoing jobs crisis.

Cathy Harding: At the upcoming Rediscovering Government conference titled “A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency,” you’re going to make the case that solving the jobs emergency requires a comprehensive approach. Is that a new perspective on job creation? In other words, what needs to be included as part of a meaningful response that has not be included before?

Jeff Madrick: I think it basically is a new approach. I think people have their one or two favorites. Mainstream economists almost solely talk about education; in fact, there is a quote from Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz of Harvard in a Mike Milken Institute publication that says, yes things like minimum wage and unionization may matter, but they really don’t matter very much. It’s almost all education, or Raghuram Rajan, who is a well-known Chicago economist, says the big problem is education. I think even left-wing economists will say the big problem is education. In my view it is one of many problems.

There are bills out there that are moderately comprehensive, like Tom Harkin’s bill, and he’s going talk about that.

Minimum wage contributes too, and de-unionization contributes to it. I think the lack of enforcement of the employment laws contributes to it, which has been serious.

We don’t pay any attention to job training programs in a serious way, aside from college education.

I think there are issues about health insurance that have to be talked about; there are issues about Wall Street, in particular, that are almost totally ignored by Washington, D.C. Wall Street’s impact on suppressing good jobs has been very serious, and it’s not part of any of these bills. So I think all of these matter.

And finally, government investment in infrastructure and new technologies are job creators.

CH: What happens if you don’t approach the jobs crisis across many planes?

JM: We are going to continue to generate fewer jobs than we should, and we won’t generate enough jobs that pay well. That’s a big deal. We are already in a very serious hole merely on the number of jobs, but the quality of jobs, in terms of wages they pay, and in terms of benefits like retirement and health insurance, is stunningly bad.

CH: So you are saying that without a multi-pronged approach to the jobs issue, it is just going to get worse?

JM: I think, yeah. I think if we listen to what most economists tell us to do, we would be a very sad country.

CH: So, Jeff, when we read reports that say unemployment is going down, and that jobs are being created, what questions should people be asking about those numbers?

JM: Long-term unemployment, that is, people who can’t get jobs for 6 months or more, is very high. It has been setting records for a long time now. So yes, there is a slight improvement in the unemployment rate, but it is not nearly enough. What are the reasons for that? Part of it is slow economic growth in itself. Why do we have slow economic growth? Probably the single most important reason, but not only reason, is high levels of debt that are held over from the mortgage boom. So slow growth contributes to that lack of rapid job creation, but so do these other factors, including Wall Street and pressure on wages by business. Some of it generated by Wall Street needs and stock market needs, some of it generated by globalization and the ability to go somewhere else.

CH: So you are not cheered when you see a report that says the unemployment rate is down to 7.5 percent?

JM: All of it has to be in context. I think it suggests, given that the government is taking money out of the economy through this now famous sequestration process, that the economy is stronger than we thought it might be. If only they would get out of the way, we would probably be creating a lot more jobs, but they are not getting out of the way. So that is another issue we have to deal with. So I am cheered that the job situation in the latest reporting month was better than most people thought, given that the government is stepping on the breaks and we are still moving.

CH: You talked about it not just being a matter of jobs, but the question of good jobs. The students involved in Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network through their Government By and For Millennial America report have identified that quality of jobs as being a very important issue for the country as a whole, and their generation. Can you specify what a bold approach might look like, specifically for the generation just coming onto the job market?

JM: Young people are getting the tail end of what is a pretty crummy job market for almost everybody. So to tailor a jobs program for the very young probably requires a variety of different types of policies. Still, going to college enables you to at least get a job, even if it is not a good job. A lot of people who go to college have to take jobs where you don’t really need a college education. So is there a simple answer – go get a college education? It is a negative answer. Don’t not get a college education.

We may have to tailor jobs programs run by the government to hire young people. It may come to that. We might need job-hiring programs by the government in the end. And we can’t neglect that idea, or keep it out of sight because we haven’t done for so long, or because “it is not the private market.” The big crisis is for the young people.

If you get a bad- or lower-paying job at 25, it probably affects your earning power for the rest of your life. So it is a pretty serious issue.

CH: You have written a lot about what you call “the age of greed.” Is there is a cultural aspect to this current jobs crisis?

JM: I haven’t thought about that sufficiently. I think there is now too easy an acceptance that people won’t get good jobs and that the future may not be very good. That’s rather a new thing in America. One of my favorite stories is from Fernand Braudel, the historian, who says, way back who knows when, a Frenchman wrote a letter from Wyoming or somewhere like that. He said, “You can’t believe what they are doing in this town. They are building City Hall a mile from where we all live, and where the town center now is. Why? Because they’re so optimistic the town is going to grow so much that will be the new center.” I don’t think we have much of that kind of optimism. Ironically, the great so-called optimistic president, Ronald Reagan, in my view, was the guy who made us all pessimists -- that we can’t rely on government to make things better and that all we have to do is have good thoughts and things will get better on their own. So now that I think about it and you brought it up, I think there is a pessimism that’s taking root in our society that is very dangerous. I don’t think if you talk to people who are 35 now and have children that they are extremely optimistic about prospects for their children. 

CH: The closing panel at the jobs conference will address momentum building. What can people expect to take away from that?

JM: I think that most of us don’t think that a jobs conference or a well-written jobs proposal is immediately going to result in action. I think we have to win people over with argument, and persuasion, and facts, and a sense of what is really at stake here. And I think that’s what building momentum is about. One can say, “Win over one person at a time, and then eventually you get a movement.” It is something like that. And I think that is what Rediscovering Government is going have to be dedicated to. We are not going go down there and change the world on June 4th, but we want to lay the groundwork for fighting the ongoing battle. And indeed, laying the groundwork and setting the political agenda for the elections of 2014, and especially 2016. We want to influence elections. We want a job-creating President and a job-creating Congress.

The full agenda for the June 4th conference is now available online. Click here to learn more about the speakers and RSVP today.

Job search image via Shutterstock.com

Today's leaders must recognize that job creation is the key to boosting revenues for the government and the people.

Now, the rise and fall of national income—since they tell the story of how much you and I and everybody else are making—are an index of the rise and fall of national prosperity. They are also an index of the prosperity of your Government. The money to run the Government comes from taxes; and the tax revenue in turn depends for its size on the size of the national income. When the incomes and the values and transactions of the country are on the down-grade, then tax receipts go on the down-grade too. If the national income continues to decline, then the Government cannot run without going into the red. The only way to keep the Government out of the red is to keep the people out of the red. And so we had to balance the budget of the American people before we could balance the budget of the national Government.—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

The news that the nation added 165,000 jobs in April and that the unemployment rate has dipped to 7.5 percent—its lowest since December 2008—is of course welcome. It has eased the fears of many economists that recent cuts in federal spending might stall our somewhat anemic recovery, helped boost the stock market to record levels, and has been cited by Alan Krueger, the Chairman of the President’s Economic Advisors, as “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

But as many economists have also reported, the April rate of job growth is still far too low to bring about the level of re-employment needed to bring us back to full employment, and, worse still, the slight improvement in the overall unemployment rate masks a good many far more disturbing statistics. Many of the jobs acquired in April are low-skill and low-paying. Some of the drop in the unemployment rate can be attributed to the fact that millions of Americans have stopped looking for work and have dropped out of the work force all together—496,000 people in March 2013 alone. Then there are the under-employed, who also rank in the millions. If we add their ranks to those who are unemployed or have dropped out of the work force altogether, we arrive at an overall “underemployment rate” of 13.9 percent, up from the previous month’s rate of 13.8 percent. Taken together this means that roughly 22 million Americans are either unemployed or under-employed—a staggering figure, which after four years of so-called “recovery” has some economists predicting that long-term un-and under-employment may now be a permanent fixture of the American landscape.

What is even more shocking, however, is that in spite of all of these grim statistics, grim statistics that reflect the hardship and pain of millions, much of the political discourse in Washington—and in the media—remains fixated on the debt and deficit and the Republican demand for a balanced budget. It is almost as if Washington has all but given up on trying to take direct action to bring about a better employment picture. This realization is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that one of the more significant contributors to our persistently high unemployment rate in the past year has been public sector layoffs. 

Calls for the federal government to balance its books are not new, of course. Thanks to the extremely effective public persuasion campaign of the conservative right, we have heard this refrain time and time again. It has now become de rigueur for most politicians— no matter what their party—to pay lip service to the need to get “our house in order” and cut the deficit no matter what the consequences for the average American.

It wasn’t always this way, however. In the mid-1930s, when faced with a similar economic crisis and similar calls for cuts in federal spending, Franklin Roosevelt took an entirely different tack. He insisted that in the midst of a crisis where—much like today—we faced both declining federal revenues and increasing unemployment, “a national choice had to be made” between those who argued that the government should do nothing and “let Nature take its course” and those who argued for federal intervention in the economy, even if it meant running a deficit. As FDR saw it, what stood between his administration and a balanced budget were “millions of needy Americans, denied the promise of a decent American life.” In light of this, he argued that “to balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people,” which would have required either “a capital levy that would have been confiscatory” or accepting “human suffering with callous indifference." "When Americans suffered,” he went on, “we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.”

And so the Roosevelt Administration launched programs like the Works Progress Administration that built much of the infrastructure we still enjoy today and which gave millions of Americans, from common laborers to structural engineers, the joy and dignity of work. FDR admitted that “this cost money”—and the American people understood that this would continue to cost money “for several years to come.” But given the dire state of the economy and the lack of demand in the private sector, the American people understood that it was the right thing to do.

Unlike today’s politicians, however, FDR refused to pander to the sky-is-falling rhetoric of the conservative right on the disastrous consequences that would accrue to the country by running a deficit in the midst of an economic crisis. For them FDR had a simple answer. He flat out rejected “this foolish fear about the crushing load the debt will impose upon your children and mine.” On the contrary, he went on:

This debt is not going to be paid by oppressive taxation on future generations. It is not going to be paid by taking away the hard-won savings of the present generation. It is going to be paid out of an increased national income and increased individual incomes produced by increasing national prosperity.

In other words, FDR understood that the real crisis the country faced in the Great Depression was an employment crisis—not a deficit crisis—and that in the long run the “only way to keep the Government out of the red” was, as he said, “to keep the people out of the red.” And so he set his priority on the one thing he knew would help bolster the revenue of both the American people and their government: millions upon millions of jobs.

Unfortunately, much of our leadership in Washington today seems to have lost sight of this fact, and instead of taking meaningful action to help grow the economy and alleviate the suffering of the millions of unemployed, would prefer to cut spending and engage in another endless round of bickering about the debt and deficit. Such “callous indifference” to the plight of millions of Americans is no way to bring about an end to the current crisis or build a better future for our children.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

For more on solutions to the ongoing unemployment crisis, join the Roosevelt Institute in Washington, D.C. on June 4th for A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency: Setting the Political Agenda for 2014 and 2016.

Unemployment line image via Shutterstock.com.

What the IRS scandal really shows us is that it's getting harder and harder to draw a line between electioneering and political speech.

As the report of the IRS Inspector General shows, the agency’s scrutiny of conservative groups applying for non-profit status was, more than anything, a clumsy response to a task the IRS is ill-equipped to carry out – monitoring an accidental corner of campaign finance law, a corner that was relatively quiet until about 2010.

That corner is the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization, belonging to what are sometimes called “social welfare” groups, which enjoy the triple privilege of tax exemption (though not for their donors), freedom to engage in some limited election activity, and, unlike other political committees (PACs, SuperPACs, parties, etc.), freedom from any requirement to disclose information about donors or spending. The use of (c)(4)s as campaign vehicles didn’t originate with the Citizens United decision in 2010 (Citizens United, the organization that brought the case, was already a (c)(4)), but the decision seems to have created a sense that the rules had changed, and even small groups – especially, apparently, local Tea Party organizations -- rushed to create (c)(4)s.

501(c)(4)s are not prohibited from engaging in political speech of most kinds. They are free to be “biased” without jeopardizing their tax exemption. They can advocate for or against legislation, they can lobby the government or criticize it. They don’t have to make any effort to be “nonpartisan” – for example, they can support a proposal that is only supported by members of one party, or directly advise only members of one party. And they can engage in some activity directly intended to influence the outcome of an election, as long as that doesn’t constitute the organization’s primary purpose.

There’s some confusion about the definition of “primary purpose,” discussed in great depth elsewhere, but what the IRS was trying to do was to identify organizations that seemed more likely to be heavily involved in electoral activity. Since the organizations were new, there was no way to look at their actual activities to see whether they were mostly electoral. So the agency had to rely on clues in the applications, like names and telltale phrases. If organizations had words like “Democrat” or “Republican” in their titles, for example, it would be reasonable to look more closely at their election activities, or possible future activities, than an organization that called, for example, “Save the Turtles.” I’m told that organizations with the names of political parties do receive extra scrutiny, even if in some cases, like “Students for a Democratic Society,” the word might mean something unrelated to the name of the party. That’s what the closer scrutiny would find out.

“Tea Party” in 2009 and 2010 was unquestionably an election category – there were “Tea Party” candidates and there was a “Tea Party Caucus” in Congress. It was not unreasonable for the IRS to use that phrase as an indicator that an organization using that phrase might be more inclined to engage in elections. There are comparable phrases on the left – for example, the term “Netroots” might suggest election involvement, as there were groups that identified and endorsed “Netroots” Democratic candidates in 2006 and later. Perhaps there were simply fewer organizations applying for (c)(4) status with that word, or they came in before the 2010 flood, or perhaps the IRS did screen on that word – we don’t know.

While there’s a perfectly plausible case for the IRS to use flag-words that indicate an election-focused movement, the actual questions asked of the groups do raise some concerns. If accurate, they did seem to go beyond evidence that these organizations were primarily engaged in elections, such as questions about lobbying and the role of family members.

But the reason these questions are complicated for the IRS, or for any agency assigned to police these complicated distinctions, is this: the line between robust political speech and influencing elections has become frightfully difficult to draw. Finding the right line around what is an “election” is really the fundamental problem in campaign finance. Almost everyone accepts the premise of “electoral exceptionalism” – elections are structured and require some particular rules, different from the rules that apply generally to political speech. The rule in most states that keeps campaigners 75 or 100 feet from the voting booths is the most obvious uncontroversial restriction on political speech, and there is broad acceptance of the idea that direct contributions to candidates and campaigns should be limited to prevent corruption and dependence. But what happens after that? What about outside spending that looks just like campaign spending? We used to think there was a clear distinction between “issue ads” that were expressing a view on an issue and “electioneering communications” that were the equivalent of campaign contributions. That distinction is actually what the Citizens United case was about -- the provision of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that defined broadcast communications that mentioned a candidate within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election as electioneering, which had to be financed with regulated funds.

That was an improvised line then, and it’s gotten even blurrier since. Part of the problem is partisanship – it used to be, for example, that there were environmentalists in both parties, supporters of social spending in both parties. A political ad about the environment was just that. But what’s an ad or brochure attacking “Obamacare” during the election year? Every Republican opposes it, and they’ve given it the name of the president. The Tea Party was based on issues, yes, but above all else, it was based on unflagging, total opposition to Obama and congressional Democrats.

To figure out where election advocacy begins and regular political speech ends in these cases was certainly more than mid-level IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati could handle. But it’s not an easy challenge for anyone. All the noise about IRS “targeting” and about free speech and corporate speech is a distraction from a real challenge of money in elections: finding an agreement on the line around an “election,” and establishing some clear rules for what happens within that line in order to ensure that elections are fair and open and don’t lead to corruption. 

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Audit invitation image via Shutterstock.com