In March Oregon lost 400 jobs.  In earlier months of the current recession it was much worse, but it’s still not good, as the unemployment rate is holding steady at both the federal and state levels.  While we are no longer losing so many jobs every month, neither are we seeing much job growth.  And we haven’t taken steps to ensure that those factors which caused this recession will be prevented in the future, either.

Congress has passed bills continuing unemployment benefits to people who have lost their jobs and can’t find new ones.  They have passed jobs bills that have protected many jobs from being lost and added some new jobs.  They have passed health insurance reform to try to rein in the cost of health insurance and make sure that more people are covered to ease the burden on employers and workers who pay for their insurance.  While they have stopped the job losses, more must be done.

There are bills in Congress now that would spur job creation and stop some of the financial services industry’s most egregious activities which caused the crisis, but need more support to be passed.

The Local Jobs for America Act

In the House of Representatives Congressman George Miller of California has a jobs bill that will help retain important services and create new jobs as well.  The Local Jobs for America Act will relieve local government budgets which have had to endure significant cuts by providing money to keep thousands of teachers, police, and firefighters on the job, as well as other critical public service workers, and also provide funding for 50,000 on-the-job private sector training positions.

The middle class needs effective public services like education and public safety, and we can’t fund those jobs without private sector job growth, either.  This jobs bill will support both public services and private sector jobs to bring back economic prosperity for all Americans.

The Restoring American Financial Stability Act

In the Senate, Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has a bill that would start to rein in excesses and abuses in the financial service industry.  The Restoring American Financial Stability Act will do a number of different things to protect the middle class from the often perilous behavior of Wall Street, including requiring more oversight of especially risky financial products.  Perhaps most encouraging on that subject is that the Act would create a new watchdog agency to keep the financial services industry in check and prevent consumers from being taken advantage of.  Significantly, the bill would also prevent another taxpayer bailout of the banks in the future, because we can’t afford to have them lose our retirement savings, then ask for our money to fix their problem, again.

This a good start, but Senator Dodd’s bill should be made much stronger in a few ways.  We believe that the watchdog agency must be fully independent so that it is not under the influence of people in the industry that it oversees.  Risky leveraged buyout funds must be under the same kind of oversight as hedge funds, and the size of banks must be limited, so that if one fails in the future, its failure will not have such a dramatic impact on the rest of the economy.  And bank employees must be treated fairly when banks fail, as they would be when a company goes bankrupt.

We Need More for a Real Economic Recovery

In Oregon we’ve still got one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, and while many places in the state have record high foreclosure rates, in Deschutes County in particular one of every 18 homes is in foreclosure.  We’ve been hit hard by the financial crisis which caused this recession.  We need our representatives in Congress to act to get us out of this mess and do what they can to prevent it from happening again, and we believe that these bills will help in that effort.

Our legislators should support these bills to make the economy work for all Oregonians.