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Thursday, September 02, 2010
Economists at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg estimate that, without the economic policy action of the Federal Reserve and the Bush and Obama administrations, national unemployment would be approaching 16 percent and the state unemployment rate would be in the neighborhood of 14 percent.
A non-profit economic research group today released an annual report on the state of workers in Pennsylvania that concluded that, absent policy actions taken by the federal government in the wake of the recession, Pennsylvania and the nation would be looking at double digit unemployment rates today.
Economists at the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg estimate that, without the economic policy action of the Federal Reserve and the Bush and Obama administrations, national unemployment would be approaching 16 percent and the state unemployment rate would be in the neighborhood of 14 percent.
“Our economy is a product of conscious policy choices,” said Dr. Mark Price, labor economist for the KRC. “Federal policy stopped the economic free fall. And policy choices at the national and state level will powerfully shape the future health of the economy for middle class families.“Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Thursday, September 02, 2010
At first blush, working for an agency that keeps tabs on critical safety issues at nuclear power plants staffed by the likes of Homer Simpson might not seem like the ideal job.
OK, Homer is a fictional, animated character, cast in the Simpsons as a lazy, incompetent worker at a nuclear plant. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has the heart-stopping responsibility of policing the nation’s nuclear facilities, tops a new survey of “best places” to work in the federal government. The fifth such list compiled since 2003 is the first report card on working conditions under the Obama administration, according to The Washington Post.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko At the bottom, only 57.1 percent of employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development—HUD—and the same percentage at the National Archives and Records Administration were satisfied with their jobs. Those two agencies tied for 31st in the rankings.
What makes government workers happy? Effective leadership from senior management, seems to be the answer. That’s where the NRC scored high, with 72 percent of its people crediting their bosses for strong leadership. Second on the most desirable list was the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress, followed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Smithsonian and NASA.
The Office of Management and Budget and the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency faulted in the past for weak oversight of the financial industry, were downgraded by federal employees in the survey by the Partnership for Public Service and the American University’s School of Public Affairs. OMB, which prepares the president’s budget and also institutes management reforms, slipped from third among small agencies to 25th.
The SEC, which has endured restructuring and a turnover in top management, dropped from 11th in a previous survey to 24th in employee satisfaction among large agencies.
“We would have liked to see different numbers. But we’ve been through a lot in the last 18 months,” the SEC’s chief human capital officer, Jeffrey Risinger, told the Post. “When you go through those kinds of efforts, communication is challenging. There are times when you don’t have clear answers to communicate.”
Overall, it appears the federal government is a pretty decent place to work. Employee satisfaction was up for more than two-thirds in the polling of 263,000 federal workers. Nearly 79 percent said they were at least “satisfied” with their jobs.Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Monday, August 30, 2010
Small businesses got $3 billion more in federal contracts in fiscal year 2009 than in fiscal year 2008, according to data released by the Small Business Administration late Friday.
Small businesses were awarded $96.8 billion in federal prime contracts during the period. This represents 21.89 percent of all federal contracts awarded to private business. The SBA has been charged with meeting a goal of overseeing the award of 23 percent of all federal contracts to small businesses.
“This represents real progress, but not enough. We must reaffirm our commitment to ensuring that the 23 percent goal is met and exceeded,” SBA Administrator Karen Mills said in a statement. “Federal contracts awarded to small businesses are a ‘win-win’ – providing small businesses with the opportunity to grow and create jobs, and offering innovative services and essential goods to the government at great value to the taxpayers.”
Of the $96.8 billion, 5 percent went to women-owned businesses, while another 5 percent were awarded to “small disadvantaged” businesses. Three percent of the contracts went to veteran-owned businesses and another 3 percent were awarded to HUBZone businesses.
The small business Procurement Scorecard fulfills a requirement by President Obama and Congress for more accountability, according to the SBA. It also measures progress that departments are making to ensure small business opportunities remain an integral part of their acquisition of goods and services to meet mission objectives.Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Monday, August 30, 2010
U.S. President Barack Obama says Congress should make passing an outstanding aid package for small American businesses its first priority.
Speaking in the Rose Garden Monday, the president said that the first order of business for Congress should be “making it easier for our small businesses to grow and hire.”
In the last months of 2009, small businesses accounted for more than 60 per cent of jobs lost in the United States.
Up to $12 billion US in tax relief from eight separate tax cuts and expanding credit to small businesses are part of Obama’s sweeping jobs bill, which is currently being held up by partisan bickering in the Senate.
The bill includes a $30-billion fund to promote small business lending. Under the plan, the Treasury Department would lend money to community banks that predominantly lend to small businesses outside the purview of larger lenders.
‘Drop the blockade’: Obama
The bill is stuck in Congress after lawmakers declined to pass it into law before breaking for the summer.
“Holding the bill hostage is directly detrimental to our economic growth,” Obama said. “I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade.”
Obama also unveiled plans to extend tax cuts for the middle class that are set to expire this year and reinvest in clean energy and research and development Monday.
He also said that he will rebuild more “of our infrastructure for the future,” and will present more ideas to rescue the moribund American economy in the weeks and months ahead.
After his 10-day vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, One of Obama’s main priorities is to show that he is still minding the economy.
A string of weak economic reports in recent weeks has fed fears that the economy would fall back into recession.Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Monday, August 30, 2010
The White House says the multiyear $814 billion stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009 boosted employment by 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs.
Amid mounting signs that the economic recovery is faltering, one potential remedy seems out of the question: a booster shot of government spending.
The White House says the multiyear $814 billion stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009 boosted employment by 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs and raised the nation’s annual economic output by almost $400 billion. A recent study by two prominent economists generally agrees, crediting the pump-priming with averting “what could have been called Great Depression 2.0.”
If President Obama expected anyone to say, “Thank you,” however, he’s been disappointed. In a recent USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, 59% of respondents disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy. In the partisan war over the economy’s performance, the word “stimulus” has became synonymous with “boondoggle,” making the notion of a repeat any time soon highly unlikely — especially if Republicans seize control of one or both houses of Congress in November.
MORE FED ACTION?:Could depend on economic reports this week
ECONOMIST SURVEY: Backs Fed, growth over deficit reduction
INFOMOTION GRAPHIC: A historical look at the national debt
INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: Getting a grip on government debt
“We have played our policy hand. Now we’ve got to hope it’s good enough,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics and co-author of the recent study.
Controversy has dogged the stimulus program since its debut. Formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, the spending effort was designed to fill the hole in the economy left after the housing and credit bubbles imploded. The program was proposed by the president and enacted by Congress at the depths of the post-Lehman-Bros. financial collapse, when the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 6% and losing 750,000 jobs a month.
Politically, the “Recovery Act” — which is divided among tax cuts, financial aid for cash-strapped state governments, emergency unemployment assistance and spending on roads, bridges and other infrastructure — has taken fire from the left and the right.
Liberal economists such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman complained that the massive program should have been larger and was marred by the inclusion of excessive tax cuts that would have a less-immediate impact on job creation. Republicans derided the legislation as wasteful spending that would add to ballooning government debt.
Eighteen months later, the consensus among economists is that the stimulus worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s. But the spending’s impact was dwarfed by other crisis-fighting tools deployed by the Bush and Obama administrations, including costly efforts to stabilize crippled banks and the Fed’s unconventional monetary policy.
“I think it was important for confidence. ... But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government’s strategy,” said Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Counting jobs
Christina Romer, the outgoing head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, never really recovered politically from her January 2009 forecast that the stimulus would keep the unemployment rate below 8%. In fact, by the time Obama signed the Recovery Act into law on Feb. 17, 2009, it already had breached that level. (The original administration forecast was prepared using data from late 2008 before the already-wounded economy deteriorated even more dramatically.) The unemployment rate hit 10.1% in October 2009 and stands at 9.5% today.
Republican leaders such as Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia say that proves the stimulus a failure. But Romer last month told the Joint Economic Committee that the stimulus “helped to turn the economy from free fall to recovery.”
It’s no surprise that the administration would proclaim its own policies a success. But its verdict is backed by economists at Goldman Sachs, IHS Global Insight, JPMorgan Chase and Macroeconomic Advisers, who say the stimulus boosted gross domestic product by 2.1% to 2.7%.
It’s impossible to determine precisely how many jobs or how much growth the stimulus program caused. In a nearly $14 trillion economy, economists can’t go employer to employer counting new hires. And there are too many moving parts to confidently link any single factor with individual hiring decisions. Roughly one-third of the stimulus, for example, came in the form of tax cuts, which are designed to boost demand for a wide array of products and eventually result in related hiring.
But to estimate the answers to such questions, economists rely on models based on historical relationships between various policies and real-world results. Earlier this month, Zandi and co-author Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, released the most detailed assessment of the government’s efforts to combat the so-called Great Recession. Neither economist is regarded as a partisan firebrand. Zandi, for example, backed John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign and has advised members of both parties.
Their conclusion: The fiscal stimulus created 2.7 million jobs and added $460 billion to gross domestic product. Unemployment would be 11% today if the stimulus hadn’t been passed and 16.5% if neither the fiscal stimulus nor the banks’ rescue had been enacted, according to Zandi and Blinder. “It’s pretty hard to deny that it had a measurable impact,” Zandi said.
As of Aug. 13, almost 64% of the program’s original $787 billion had been spent. (The Congressional Budget Office, which is among those concluding that the program had a broadly positive economic result, currently projects the Recovery Act’s total cost to be $814 billion. Including an earlier Bush administration tax rebate and some unrelated programs, total stimulus spending will reach about $1 trillion over several years.)
Stimulus outlays first topped $100 billion in the third quarter of 2009, which is when the economy resumed growing after the recession that started in 2007. Likewise, personal consumption spending began to increase in the third quarter after four consecutive quarterly declines. To Zandi, those facts buttress his model’s conclusion that the program resuscitated a moribund economy.
Not everyone is convinced. “I can’t find in my analysis that the 2009 stimulus package had much effect at all,” says economist John Taylor of Stanford University.
Taylor, who served as undersecretary of the Treasury under former president George W. Bush, says the recovery that began last year stemmed from a pickup in business investment unrelated to government spending. He dismissed the Zandi-Blinder conclusions as divorced from what is actually occurring in the economy and reflecting built-in assumptions about the impact of government spending.
At issue is the so-called multiplier effect of government spending. Economists such as Taylor who are skeptical of government’s pump-priming role argue that for every additional $1 of government spending, GDP increases by less than $1. Those whose models back the stimulus generally assume that $1 in government spending adds more than $1 to total output via the multiplier effect. “If you crank up government spending, it will create jobs,” says Sung Won Sohn, an economist at California State University.
The actual multiplier changes depending upon the condition of the economy. Over the course of the business cycle, the average multiplier is less than 1, Zandi acknowledged. If unemployment is low and the government borrows money for stimulus projects — thus crowding out some private companies seeking to borrow money — the net result can be muted. But with unemployment high and the government able to borrow money for 10 years at historically low 2.5% rates, Uncle Sam’s borrowing doesn’t come at the expense of the private sector and the stimulus is a bigger net positive, he says.
“Ultimately, people have to use their judgment here,” says Taylor. “There’s a difficulty of knowing what would have happened otherwise.”
Facing congressional elections in less than 90 days, administration officials say they know what would have happened: The ailing economy would be in worse shape if not for the stimulus. But even some of those directly benefiting from the stimulus remain dissatisfied amid the economy’s myriad woes.
When the president conducted an Aug. 18 town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, one questioner said he worked for a company that the stimulus funds were helping.
“It’s keeping me and my crews afloat for a while. But what we really need is a stronger housing market here in Columbus. We need to be building new roads and making houses affordable for people. They need to get out there buying. They need to be able to get the loans. And what’s up with that?” the unidentified man asked, according to a White House transcript.
Lack of appetite
The economy expanded for four consecutive quarters after the stimulus spending accelerated. But in recent weeks, in the aftermath of the European debt crisis, what once had seemed like steady if modest growth has noticeably weakened. In the week ended Aug. 14, new jobless claims breached the 500,000 barrier for the first time since November. They fell the following week to 473,000, but the four-week moving average remains at the highest level in nine months. Meanwhile, sales of existing homes in July fell 27% from the previous month, reaching their lowest level in 15 years, and durable goods orders disappointed.
“The recovery in the U.S. appears to have come to a complete halt,” says John Higgins of Capital Economics.
Among investors, fears of a second recession or “double dip” are rising as stimulus spending gradually tapers off. Some analysts such as David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff in Toronto say that the first downturn, which began in December 2007, never really ended. “This is a depression, and not just some garden-variety recession,” he wrote clients.
The administration has proposed some modest additional spending measures, such as a plan to aid small business that is stalled in Congress. With about one-third of the original stimulus money yet to be spent, and rising political angst over the public debt, there are no plans for a major new initiative. If the economy requires any additional impetus, it will likely come from the Federal Reserve, where Chairman Ben Bernanke has signaled a willingness to expand unconventional efforts to increase the money supply.
Small-scale efforts to support demand are warranted, Zandi says. But as the economy struggles to work off the excess debt clogging household and bank balance sheets, time may be the most important salve. “Policymakers should remain aggressive,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any political appetite for a big stimulus plan.“Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
President Obama’s much-maligned economic stimulus package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of this year, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
In its latest quarterly assessment of the act, the CBO said the stimulus lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 and 1.8 percentage points during the quarter ending in June and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million. The higher figure would come close to making good on Obama’s pledge that the act would save or create as many as 3.5 million jobs by the end of this year.
The CBO said the act also increased the nation’s gross domestic product by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent in the second quarter, indicating that the stimulus may have been the primary source of growth in the U.S. economy. The Commerce Department estimates that GDP grew 2.4 percent in the second quarter, a figure many economists expect to be revised lower in a report due out Friday.
The CBO cautioned that the the act’s effects are expected to “gradually diminish during the second half of 2010 and beyond,” leaving the private sector to pick up the slack in an economy that is already showing signs of deteriorating rapidly. On the bright side, the CBO revised the cost of the package downward: Originally estimated to cost $787 billion over 10 years, the stimulus was later estimated to cost $862 billion. But in the report released Tuesday, the CBO said it now expects the measure to cost only about $814 billion through 2019, with 70 percent of those costs incurred by the end of this year.
Polls show that the public is deeply skeptical about the stimulus and tends to believe that it increased the national deficit without improving the economy. Republicans hoping to seize control of Congress in the November midterm elections have been blasting the act as a failure. But the CBO, which is respected by both Republicans and Democrats, has long held a different view and Democrats hailed Tuesday’s report as further vindication of the president’s signal economic achievement.
“This new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is further confirmation of what we’ve been hearing from leading economists, the nation’s governors and families across the country: the Recovery Act is working to rescue the economy from eight years of failed economic policy and rebuild it even stronger than before,” Vice President Biden said in a statement.Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Monday, August 23, 2010
The $26 billion federal jobs bill is intended to shore up Medicaid and protect education jobs.
The Alabama Department of Education recently informed local superintendents how much their systems would receive under the federal jobs bill passed by Congress on Aug. 10.
The $26 billion federal jobs bill is intended to shore up Medicaid and protect education jobs. About $10 billion of the bill will be spent on education alone.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, the money will save about 161,000 education jobs nationwide from the budget ax. Funds from the bill cannot be used to pay central office employees or to pay off debt.
The amounts break down as follows:
- Dale County Schools $586,317
- Coffee County Schools $442,994
- Geneva County Schools $564,272
- Henry County Schools $586,933
- Houston County Schools $1,272,021
- Daleville City Schools $250,069
- Dothan City Schools $1,881,769
- Elba City Schools $161,982
- Enterprise City Schools $1,254,287
- Geneva City Schools $261,985
- Ozark City Schools $507,682
Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Monday, August 23, 2010
Despite months of falling tax receipts and announced teacher layoffs, Georgia added 7,000 government jobs during the last year, according to Labor Department statistics requested by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The federal government, and the military in particular, accounted for many of the new jobs. Yet state government also expanded, primarily due to an increase in public college and university jobs, the numbers show.
Local governments across the state shed 3,300 jobs, though school systems added an extra 100 teachers statewide.
Government jobs have blunted the recession’s effect on the state. Georgia’s unemployment rate dipped in July to 9.9 percent from 10 percent the month before, due largely to frustrated job seekers who simply quit looking for work, the state Labor Department reported Thursday.
Local, state and federal workers fill 663,400 jobs across Georgia, or 17.4 percent of all non-farm employment in the state. Four years ago, government jobs comprised only 15.5 percent of all jobs.
The promise of steady government work drew 1,500 job seekers to a Decatur job fair recently. DeKalb County wants to fill 137 positions including police officers, building code enforcers, garbage men, probation officers and property appraisers. Another fair is planned for mid-September.
“I’m looking for something that has some stability and I figure government jobs are stable,” said Viola Hardy, an unemployed human-resources director who filled out applications and dropped off resumes at the Maloof Auditorium in Decatur last week.
In all, Georgia notched a 1.1 percent increase in government jobs over the last year. The federal government added 7,300 jobs since July 2009, a 7.3 percent uptick. Meanwhile, the private sector continues to shuck jobs in Georgia with a net loss of 37,400 slots since July 2009.
Credit the Defense Department for many of Georgia’s new federal jobs. The Pentagon’s reorganization of bases nationwide, and a rise in military and veterans’ hospital workers, added 2,000 federal jobs in Georgia, according to the labor department analysis.
Most federal census jobs, which provided a short-term job boost earlier this year, have since disappeared.
Higher education helped buffer state government job losses. Amid rising enrollments, Georgia has added 10,400 public college and university workers—a 14.3 percent increase—since July 2009.
County and city governments lopped 3,300 jobs off payrolls the last year, though fears of widespread teacher layoffs—trumpeted in headlines across Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb counties—proved unfounded. Local school systems actually added 100 jobs, net, across Georgia.
The resiliency of public sector employment comes despite the steep drop in tax collections by local and state governments since the recession began in December 2008.
Yet federal job-saving money, and an abhorrence by politicians to cut services visible to voters, have buffered public-sector employees.
“Police officers will always have crime. Firemen will always have fires,” said David James, an unemployed trucker and warehouseman from McDonough who sought a code enforcement job at the DeKalb fair. “Agencies like that are recession-resistant and won’t drop off like the private sector.”
After announcing last spring that DeKalb needed to trim 600 jobs due to lower tax receipts, county officials now say they went too far after 800 hundred employees took early retirement.
DeKalb CEO Burrell Ellis said that once key jobs are re-filled, the 8,000-employee county still will end up with a net job loss of 600 positions.
“Certainly, every government throughout the nation is facing revenue shortfalls (and) at the end of the day we’ll have a smaller, more efficient operation,” he said during the job fair. “But today is about finding opportunity in a difficult situation.”
DeKalb’s employment dance was mirrored in Cobb, Fulton and other counties that first warned of drastic job cuts this year. Fulton, which announced 1,000 county-wide layoffs in March, ended up eliminating 250 teacher positions. Cobb initially targeted 700 teachers, but lopped off only 100.
“Last spring, when school systems saw the dark clouds, budget-wise, there was speculation that as many as 3,000 would be laid off in the metro area and as many as 9,000 across the state,” said Tim Callahan, spokesman for the 80,000-member Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “The horrors we feared really didn’t manifest themselves. Most systems hung on to most of their teachers.”
Callahan credits federal stimulus money for saving jobs. Georgia had received more than $2 billion from Washington through the first quarter of this year, money that covered teacher salaries, health care and other state and local programs.
Government job growth “surprises me because my general perception is that, due to the economy, tax revenues are down and jobs are being eliminated,” said Roy Baker, 59, a former Georgia Power lineman who sought a building inspector job at the DeKalb fair. “But it’s encouraging that we’re treading water and not drowning.”
Economists expect unemployment levels to remain high through 2010. Furloughs and pay freezes will remain the norm for many government workers. Not until the private sector begins re-hiring will the overall job picture brighten.
Yet the outlook for Georgia government workers is already looking up. Washington approved another stimulus package last week that could pump $550 million into state and local coffers to keep or add thousands of teachers and other jobs in Georgia. Some of that money could fund programs that involve private hiring as well.
And, for the second consecutive month, state tax receipts rose in July.
James, 42, who got laid off in January 2009, isn’t convinced an uptick in government revenue and jobs translates into an improving economy.
“I hear the numbers, listen to the news on TV and read the paper, but on a personal level I haven’t seen things getting better,” he said Thursday. “I haven’t noticed a huge change or even a slight change in our economy.”
Government jobs in Georgia
Total jobs
7/07
7/08
7/09
7/10
All gov’t.
639,200
661,000
656,400
663,400
Federal
95,200
98,300
99,500
106,800
State
152,000
157,000
155,400
158,400
Local
392,000
405,700
401,500
398,200
As a percentage of all jobs
7/07
7/08
7/09
7/10
All gov’t.
15.5
16.2
17.1
17.4
Federal
14.9
14.9
15.2
16.1
State
23.8
23.8
23.7
23.9
Local
61.3
61.4
61.2
60.0
Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
I’ll bet you didn’t know that actress Ashley Judd just finished her Masters of Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School and is interested in public service.
As the founder of a social network dedicated to helping public servants and people in and around government connect with each other, I thought Ashley might appreciate a few suggestions for what she can do now that she has that MPA. Here are my “Top 5 Government Jobs for Ashley Judd”:
1) CFC Chairperson: Why is it that all the other cool charities have great celebrity spokespersons and CFC still lacks any real star power? In case you don’t know what CFC stands for, it stands for Combined Federal Campaign—the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign, through which Federal civilian, postal and military donors give millions of dollars each year. The campaign kicks off again on September 1 and runs through December 15. We should let Ashley run it. Combining her celebrity and sense of social justice, Ashley would most certainly increase donations and draw celebrity friends to raise awareness about the generosity of public sector employees.
2) Government Recruiter: If Ashley Judd wants to work for the government, shouldn’t everyone? Let’s send Ashley out to all the college recruitment job fairs and invite people to consider working for government. I mean, if I saw Ashley Judd at a recruitment fair, I’d stand in line for an hour to shake her hand and grab a brochure, wouldn’t you?
3) Mediator: Anyone who can mediate conflict in the Judd family has developed some solid experience for handling international conflicts. Ashley would be a great mediator in any situation, from Middle East conflict to OMB budget pass-backs. Of course, she also has a degree in French from the University of Kentucky, which can come in handy in places like the Congo.
4) Head of Government Accountability Office (GAO) or Congressional Budget Office (CBO): A large part of this job these days is to convince the general public to care what’s going in government (and not just frame it in politics). Can Ashley convince the American public to care about the growing debt and convince both politicians and citizens to take small, meaningful actions in shoring up Social Security and Medicare?
5) PSA Queen: Government produces scores if not hundreds of public service announcements each year. Many of them are not well-coordinated and fail to grab the attention of the public. Maybe we could give Ashley Judd full reign - call her the PSA Queen. Give her a decent budget and invite her to add some Hollywood quality to our PSAs and promote them like crazy.
You? What do you think? What government job do you think Ashley should consider?Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, News, Washington DC
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Michigan’s state budget situation should be a little less bleak now that about $698 million in additional federal aid appears to be headed its way.
The U.S. House approved a spending bill Tuesday and sent it to President Obama for signature.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has said Michigan will get about $318 million for schools and about $380 million for Medicaid.
Even with the extra money, Michigan still faces budget problems.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm and legislative leaders built preliminary budget plans on the expectation Michigan would get more than $500 million in extended Medicaid benefits.
Budget talks have slowed while state lawmakers await the final information on how much federal help Michigan gets.Read Full Article
posted in: Blogging, EmployerNews, Michigan, News, Washington DC
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