THE WEEKEND snowstorm - which was worse in Washington than here - was blamed for preventing the Senate from meeting its self-imposed deadline to vote on a jobs bill yesterday.
But the bill wouldn't have been ready yesterday even if the weather had been balmy. At last report, Democratic leaders were still struggling to scrounge up a Republican vote for a bill that would do half as much as the $154 billion jobs bill passed by the House in December.
That's because Democrats still won't challenge the idea that, in the Senate, a super-majority of 60 votes is needed to pass anything. (That is, unless it's only one senator who stops the Senate in its tracks. Last week, Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama put a hold on 70 presidential nominations in order to extort pork projects for his home state.)
We would support postponing the bill until the rules of the Senate were changed - if it weren't for the fact that 27 million unemployed or underemployed Americans are in deep trouble.
We face the same frustrating choice when considering the contours of the jobs bills currently on the table: The Senate bill, estimated to cost $80 billion, would help some people in the short term, and we have to support that. It would provide tax cuts to coax small businesses into hiring again and use money saved from the bank bailout to fund loans for job creation.
But this approach continues to feed a crippling phobia about the deficit, which will make it more difficult in the long run to take steps that are needed to make America economically secure again.
Offering incentives to hire new workers is a good idea, whether it's by offering a tax credit (as President Obama has proposed) or a payroll tax holiday (as the Senate is discussing). But private businesses simply are not going to hire new people unless they are sure there are lots of customers out there. And there aren't.
People who are out of work don't buy much of anything. Even people who still have jobs are cutting back. To get back to square one, before the Great Recession killed an estimated 8.4 million jobs, the economy has to create 400,000 jobs a month for three years. There's no way that's going to happen through tax cuts. At a time like this, when individuals, businesses and state and local governments are in a bind, only the federal government can spend the money to "prime the pump."
