Sunday, January 24, 2010

Oh, So It's Jobs You Want. Why Didn't You Say So In The First Place?

We are now hearing that the main focus of the upcoming State of the Union speech will be job creation.  Roll the tape back to this time last year: while jobs was a topic of discussion, Washington was headlining the historic move forward on healthcare.  The thinking was that the job situation, while bad, was under control and we would stabilize at 8% unemployment.

Fast forward to today: while a year has been spent in what seems like a fruitless quest for genuine healthcare reform, unemployment has soared above all expectations to 10%.  Not only did both Republicans and Democrats tragically take their eye off the ball, I'm not sure they even know what the game it in the first place.

So now jobs are the priority.  Well, I guess that's good to know.

I don't necessarily disagree (who could?) but I'm made a little queasy by the fact that Washington always seems to be fighting last year's war, rather than next year's war.  As bad as the job situation is, could it be possible that we've seem the worst and that the system will have, on it's own, made substantial repairs over the next twelve months? So what will be the problem--unspoken about and under the radar now--that we will be hearing about NEXT January after we've spent a year obsessing about jobs?

Just thinking out loud.  Your thoughts?

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