Both jobs and the deficit are being dealt with in Congress through conservative frames, with policies like across-the-board, untargeted tax cuts for job creation, or “entitlement reform” commissions basically oriented to cutting social services programs for the deficit.

However, a wealth of policies that would seek to create perhaps millions of jobs, while responsibly paying for the investment and then some, are taking shape on Capitol Hill.

      After he was elected AFL-CIO president in September, Richard Trumka traveled around the country on a listening tour. Here’s one story he heard, which he described this week as the AFL-CIO, along with several key allies, launched a jobs initiative to help get our nation back to work. Last summer at an [...]

So, the nation’s weightiest campaign arms dealers waltz about the Big Easy talking like Emily Post and asking the rest of us to put our napkins in our laps. That’s the news from New Orleans, where James Carville and Mary Matilin hosted a gathering of talons and fangs called “Taking the Poison Out of Partisanship.” [...]

California and a number of other states will face continued fiscal pressures, particularly once the stimulus aid to them runs out in 2011; there is no indication that the economy will rebound enough that states can meet their budgets by that time.

With voters giving voice to concerns about deficit spending at the prompting of political opponents, President Obama may be pressed to do what Congress won’t do with regard to budgetary restraint. But is it wise to do so during a nascent economic recovery?

As soon as the new unemployment numbers are out, the first question everyone should ask is “where’s the Administration’s jobs program?”

The other night, a group of bloggers got to sit down with Richard Trumka, the newly elected President of the AFL-CIO, as part of the Building the New Economy conference. In the meeting he focused on how the economic engine of the last 30 years, essentially debt-financed consumer spending, asset bubbles and Wall Street casino [...]

The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades – or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States – more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.

There are reports that President Obama will appoint a commission the week after next to “reform” Social Security. It will be headed by economists who missed the $8 trillion housing bubble and are on record as wanting to cut Social Security.

You know world financial markets are roiling when Dubai is having trouble: No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or cancelled….