The hours I spent working to get this man elected to replace Gordon Smith, the man who voted progressive only when we didn’t need him, has continued to pay dividends for Oregon and and the entire country. Now Jeff is taking on the Super Committee over jobs. Legislators like him are what happens when progressives stop whining and go to work to elect progressive Democrats.
Senator Jeff Merkley is worried. He fears that it’s increasingly unlikely that the Congressional deficit “super-committee” will make a serious effort to incorporate job creation into its mission. Worse, he worries that some of its deficit-cutting proposals could actually do further harm to the economy.
Senator Merkley has an idea on what to do about this. He is calling on both parties to agree to submit every proposal offered by the supercommittee to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to be evaluated for the impact it will have — on jobs.
He doesn’t want the CBO to evaluate the proposals just for their budgetary impact. Rather, he wants the CBO to reach a conclusion on the impact the proposals will have on unemployment, whether positive, negative, or neutral.
“We need to have every proposal that the super-committee brings out to have it scored by its jobs impact,” Merkley told me in an interview this morning. He plans to urge Democratic and GOP leaders to agree to this standard, and hopes to build a campaign to make it happen.
There’s precedent for the CBO scoring proposals for jobs impact. You can find examples of that here, here, and here. AS Merkley notes, Congress normally submits proposals for budgetary impact but Congress can request jobs impact evaluations… [emphasis added]
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I have no doubt that Republicans will object to this, because helping Americans get jobs has no place on their agenda,
6 Responses to “Oregon’s Merkley on our side over jobs”
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The Republicans will never accept this : makes way too much sense ; As stated – Jobs are not on their agenda-
True. Sense violates GOP policy.
I hope he succeeds in his lofty quest to have a jobs impact statement delivered by the CBO. That would put every Tea-publican proposal in the toilet.
It certainly would!
This makes so much sense — run every proposal through the CBO analysis ‘machine’ so that it’s impact can be measured, good, bad or neutral. The only reason that the Republicans won’t want to do this is because they will be shown up as the obstructionists they are. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the working Americans who sustain the economy.
Exactly!