Media

On Thursday, President Obama will deliver a major speech on America's employment crisis. But too often, what is lost in the call for job creation is a clear idea of what jobs we want to create.

The number of food stamp recipients is likely to hit a new high of 46 million when the Department of Agriculture releases its latest report on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) -- that's over 18 percent of American households. This should drive conservatives through the roof.

Distinguished Senior Fellow Bob Herbert took to MSNBC yesterday evening to talk about the unemployment crisis and discuss what the President needs to do to enable job creation. 

Herbert wrote in these pages yesterday as part of Demos' America Can Work Better week. 

By most accounts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has done an excellent job in response to Hurricane  Irene, even drawing praise from Bob McDonnell, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and Chris Christie.

Hurricane Irene may not have lived up to all the media hype, but it still did billions of dollars in damage. Some analysts say cleaning up the mess will boost Gross Domestic Product for the second half of 2011. These estimates are surely correct – and remind us why GDP is such a perverse way to measure economic progress.

A Silverton think tank said Tuesday that Oregon's middle class faces big issues in coming years.

The Oregon Center for Public Policy, in a report called The Fraying of Oregon's Middle Class, contends that well-paying jobs are in short supply as the cost of maintaining a family continues to increase. The center compiled the report with New York-based researcher Demos.

The biggest domestic policy failure has been the refusal of top officials in the White House and in Congress to recognize the severity of the employment crisis that has settled like a plague over American workers.