I make a discouraging prediction: academic achievement gaps between advantaged children and the various categories of disadvantaged children will grow in coming years, and education policy will be powerless to prevent this.

A recent Economic Policy Institute analysis suggests the impact of our stagnant employment rate on children’s welfare. Consider, for example, the unusually severe labor market adversity experienced by black families, and how this is likely to affect the black-white achievement gap that receives so much well-deserved attention in education policy.

— Although the national unemployment rate for whites is now 8 percent, for African-Americans it is 17 percent.

— Although the underemployment rate (including those who have given up looking for work, and those who have taken part time jobs because full time work is unavailable) for whites is now 13 percent, for African-Americans it is 25 percent.

— Although 8 percent of white children had an unemployed parent during an average month in 2010, 16 percent of African-American children had such a parent.

— Because African-American children are more likely to be in single parent homes than whites (67 percent vs. 24 percent), they are also more likely to have been in homes where no parent was working at some time during the past year.

Parental unemployment has a demonstrable impact on student achievement. When parents suffer unemployment, parents’ stress increases and they are more likely to discipline their children arbitrarily, leading to children themselves attending school in greater stress and less able to perform to the top of their ability.

When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to lose health insurance; their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care, are more likely to suffer from untreated asthma, toothaches, and earaches, and uncorrected vision problems, all of which contribute to school absenteeism and less ability to perform in schools.

When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to lose their homes, or fall behind in rent, leading to more frequent moves and interrupted schooling for their children. When parents suffer unemployment, they are more likely to shift their youngest children from more expensive (and higher-quality) early childhood programs to less expensive (and lower-quality) programs.

Even children of employed parents are suffering from the weak labor market: 38 percent of families have suffered an erosion of wages, hours worked or benefits. Many have also lost health insurance in the last year. All of these adverse impacts of the recession disproportionately affect African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income families.

Even if the modest job creation policies now being advanced by President Obama were to be enacted, and unemployment were to fall somewhat, the accumulated effects of the economic crisis will permanently damage a generation of children. The first five are the most important years of a child’s development. When parents are in economic crisis during their children’s infancy and early childhood, the damage to children’s healthy maturation permanently diminishes their future prospects. Today’s disparate experience of unemployment by parental group will be reflected not only in their young children’s relative school readiness, but in an achievement gap of high schoolers a decade hence and then in disparate adult earnings throughout their working careers.

Education policymakers devote great time and effort these days to a variety of school interventions – improving teacher quality, creating common standards, offering greater school choice. These may make a difference, but will be overwhelmed by the immediate and long-term consequences of our failure to attack unemployment with sufficient vigor. As a result, our achievement gaps will grow and whatever positive effect new school interventions may have will be swamped by the array of calamities accompanying persistent high unemployment –  parental stress, housing instability, inadequate health care, and other impacts of reduced income on parental ability to nurture their children and deliver them to school ready to learn.

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 13, the U.S. Census Bureau will release the newest data on poverty, health insurance, and annual income for 2010. This is the one data release in the year that gives us the most-quoted information on what happened to family income, poverty, and health insurance coverage over the preceding year. It’s a great window into why debates over the state of the economy and labor market have real, human consequences.

Unfortunately, we expect the bad news to continue. Why? Namely because of two factors. First, the unemployment rate increased from 9.3% in 2009 to 9.6% in 2010. Second, long-term unemployment, or the percent unemployed 27 weeks or more, grew from 31.2% in 2009 to 43.3% in 2010.

Here are the things to look out for:

Poverty:
– In 2009, the poverty rate hit a record high of 14.3%, a level not seen since 1994. The data will likely show a slight increase in poverty in 2010, a balancing act between higher unemployment and unemployment insurance extensions.
– In 2009, deep poverty hit a record high (since the data began being collected in 1975).  Again, given the poor labor market, there’s a good chance 2010 will break last year’s high as more Americans fall below half the poverty line.

Health Insurance:
– It’s likely that we’ll see a full decade of consecutive losses in employer-sponsored health insurance. As the job market remains weak (both lack of jobs and lack of bargaining power), Americans can no longer depend on their workplace for consistent affordable coverage.
– Losses in workplace coverage will lead many to become uninsured, with an expected small rise in the rate of uninsurance in the U.S. Kids will likely be somewhat insulated from these losses through public insurance, but working-age adults will continue their upward march towards nearly one in four working age adults uninsured.

Income:
– Income for the median, or typical, family, after adjusting for inflation, will have declined in 2010. Working-age households, who are most affected by deterioration in the labor market, will have seen the biggest losses.
– These losses will cap off a decade of deterioration: the median working-age household saw an income decline of nearly $5,000 between 2000 and 2009 due to both the extremely weak business cycle from 2000 to 2007 and the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009.

Check back on Tuesday for our live analysis of the 2010 data.

It is nice to see that good public policy research can make its way down the long and winding road of idea to proposal to … (dare to dream) legislation?

Last night, President Obama called for the passage of an American Jobs Act, which would spend nearly $450 billion on aid to unemployed workers and strapped state and local governments, infrastructure spending (with school renovations and improvements singled out for lots of this spending), and tax cuts for both workers and businesses.

The size and composition of the American Jobs Act looks a lot like the American Jobs Plan that EPI forwarded in December 2009. This is a good thing not just for EPI’s ego, but for the future of the American labor market. You see, the similarities in these plans aren’t evidence that EPI has some mammoth influence on the administration, instead both plans are simply based on a solid consensus of what applied economists know about what would actually work to reduce joblessness fast.

Now, we will pat ourselves on the back for a couple of things. We got the depth of the downturn and the stubbornness of the recovery right in real-time – before, unfortunately, most of our policymakers. We also have been calling all along for lengthy and generous unemployment compensation and for infrastructure spending – particularly on schools – to be a major part of stimulus. It’s extraordinarily efficient stimulus and the main strike argued against it (it’s too slow in being rolled out) never made much sense to us – because we knew early-on how long unemployment would remain elevated and how much job-growth would be needed to combat it. And, we argued that if you must make business tax cuts part of a jobs-plan to garner wide-spread support, you should at least tie these tax cuts directly to firm’s hiring decisions to maximize their bang-for-buck.

It’s a shame that policymakers’ attention drifted from job-creation for a year or more, but at least it’s back on the front-burner now. EPI was just one cog in the machine arguing for this renewed focus, but we’re happy it’s arrived and want to do what we can in the coming months to make sure that as much of this well-considered jobs-plan makes it through the (sure to be) brutal legislative process as possible.

To hear the punditry tell it, the priority Washington has given to deficit reduction over job creation reflects an ideological revolt from the grass roots against big government.  Yet, listening to such Tea Party ravings as “Keep the Government’s hands off Medicare” hardly suggests the presence of deep thinking about political philosophy. Moreover, the polls don’t show much division on the deficit/jobs question at all. Majorities think that the government should put the unemployed to work by investing in infrastructure and education and should get the money by taxing the rich.

So why the gap between what the people prefer and what their elected representatives are doing? The answer is money, which ironically is rarely mentioned by the talking heads and columnists who instruct the public about economic policy. I’m not talking about the money supply, here. I’m talking about the money that the typical politician spends 75 percent of his or her time raising for the next election.

The present quasi-lunatic state of our political debate is no accident. It is the inevitable product of the large amounts invested by corporate America in politicians who promote its interest in government de-regulation and low taxes. In 2010, for example, Tea Party- connected candidates received at least $20 million in contributions from Wall Street and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Why? After having been rescued from the consequences of their own greed and folly by President Obama, Wall Street is now outraged at the modest restraints put on their recklessness by the Dodd-Frank Bill, and any hint that they might be asked to pay a little more in taxes to help pay for the economic damage they have done.

With last year’s Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, economic policy will be even more hostage to campaign spending by the rich and powerful. My own view is that public financing of campaigns has not worked. So Progressives need to directly attack the Supreme Court ruling by organizing a movement for a constitutional amendment aimed at controlling money in politics. The opportunity for educating the public on how their government really works alone would make the effort worthwhile.

Pie in the sky? Maybe. But it is even more naïve to think that we will ever have an economy that works for working people if the interests that are sucking our economy dry continue to choose the policymakers.

President Obama’s jobs plan, if implemented, would boost employment by around 4.3 million jobs (yes, 1.6 million of those jobs would come from continuing temporary policies that are already in place and supporting the economy today, but the new initiatives alone would generate 2.6 million jobs).

How do we judge such large figures? Here’s a benchmark: right now the gap in the U.S. labor market is around 11 million jobs when you take into account both the number of jobs we are down since the start of the recession and the number we should have gained to keep up with normal growth in the working-age population. Eleven million is the number of jobs we need — and Obama has just proposed a plan that could take a big bite out of that gap.  This plan is a vital step in the direction of providing a solution that matches the scale of the ongoing crisis.

Tonight, President Obama outlined a set of measures that would create jobs. Here’s a quick look at the impact on employment over the next couple of years.

The table below shows a preliminary breakdown of the package and a first pass look at the job impact (we’ll revise and update as more details are released). The plan includes $162 billion for the continuation of the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment insurance benefits, and $285 billion for other new measures, including the expansion of the payroll holiday (to a 3.1 percentage point reduction and to employers), infrastructure investments, aid to states and localities, school construction, etc.

Overall the package would increase employment by about 4.3 million jobs over the next couple of years. The new initiatives would boost employment by about 2.6 million jobs, while the continuation of the two temporary provisions (EUI and the payroll tax holiday) would prevent a backslide of over 1.6 million jobs.

There’s still a big hole left to fill, but every step matters.

Note: The above analysis is a quick first approximation, and notably does not include a full accounting of the macroeconomic dynamics of fiscal policy, GDP, employment, etc. In particular, the 2012 impulse may take longer to ramp up for some kinds of investments and will last longer into 2013 than what is noted in the table. However, when private and government forecasters fire up their models (e.g. Moody’s, CBO, etc), they will very likely find similar results. Multipliers are from Moody’s/Zandi.

Earlier today and in our recent paperwe laid out some criteria for assessing a jobs plan. So, how did President Obama do by our criteria? Very well, as the package provides a substantial boost to the economy in addition to continuing the important efforts already underway (providing unemployment compensation and the payroll tax holiday). The components of the plan are highly effective for the most part, including spending on various types of infrastructure, support for teachers and first responders, and a new jobs tax credit. So, it will be effective and at a scale that can really move the dial. The initial year (or more) will be deficit financed so the effort doesn’t take away with one hand what the other hand had already done—paying for the program in the out years of a 10-year period allows this. So, the plan does get high grades.

For more, see Ross Eisenbrey’s analysis of the good and bad parts of the plan and John Irons’ assessment of the plan’s impact on employment and unemployment.

Now to our four criteria outlined earlier…

Criterion One: Will the policy make a real difference in job creation in the next 24 months?

The first question that should be asked about a jobs plan is, “Will a sizable number of jobs be created within two years?” The answer is that the plan does set policies that will move the dial in the next year. First, the continuation (actually the expansion) of the employee payroll tax holiday and the current program of emergency unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed prevents the loss of jobs. Second, there are new efforts that will boost spending and thereby generate jobs and lower unemployment: transportation infrastructure, the infrastructure bank, school repair and modernization, and funds for state/local governments to support teachers and first responders. This new spending amounts, we estimate, to as much as $125 billion, an amount that generates perhaps as much 1.5 million jobs. That certainly moves the dial. Third, the expansion of the employee-side payroll tax holiday and the new jobs tax credit (similar, we understand, to what EPI proposed back in 2009) will add more employment. Last, the proposal to provide a payroll tax holiday for employers on the first $5 million of payroll is not all that effective as I wrote earlier. However, some analysts  project that this would help generate jobs as well. Overall, this plan does provide a serious amount of investments and support for the economy above the continuation of the current effort (payroll tax holiday, unemployment compensation). Consequently, it will make a real difference over the next year or two.

Criterion two: Is the policy effective and efficient?

We said, “A jobs plan should be an effective use of resources so that each billion dollars in either expenditures or lost revenue generates more jobs than alternative plans.” This plan meets this criteria as it provides efforts that are very effective at generating jobs, including providing unemployment compensation, and improving infrastructure (roads, highways, schools). This part of the plan, thankfully, dominates the weaker efforts such as allowing accelerated depreciation for business or the employer-side tax holiday.

Criterion three: How is the policy funded?

We said, “The most effective job creation policies cannot be ‘paid for’ by higher taxes or other spending cuts in the near term. Effective jobs policy injects money into the economy and increases the overall demand for goods and services, thereby raising the need for more workers to produce those goods and services. But if a job creation policy must be ‘budget neutral’—that is, it must be accompanied by a tax increase or budget cut—then the benefits of the spending injected in the economy are diluted at best. So, an effective jobs plan should either be deficit financed or paid for in later years only after the economy is much stronger and has much lower unemployment.”

We don’t have much details on the ‘pay fors’ but it seems that they will all kick in no sooner than 2013 and probably later than that. So, the plan is deficit neutral over 10 years but it does raise the deficit over the next years or so. AS IT SHOULD!

Criterion four: Is the policy at the appropriate scale to produce a substantial number of jobs?

We said, “In order to put a significant dent in unemployment and establish a fast trajectory toward low unemployment, the jobs plan must be sufficiently large.” This plan puts about $450 billion into the economy over the next years or so. That is substantially above the $167 billion needed to maintain the current effort (payroll tax holiday and unemployment compensation), so the plan provides a substantial boost.

Proponents of jobs plans should set clear goals regarding the extent to which unemployment will be reduced over the next two years. While the first three criteria can be used to evaluate individual job creation policies in isolation, this final criterion of scale should be applied instead to a package of job-creation policies.

If policymakers’ effectiveness in alleviating joblessness matched their rhetorical commitment, we would live in a much happier country (and world). There is not an incumbent national politician in the country who doesn’t claim to be extremely concerned, even frantic, about the need to fight joblessness. Despite this, and despite claims that we’re just not sure what would really work to fight joblessness, the simple fact is that there are powerful policy levers that, if pulled, would rapidly lower the unemployment rate that are not being used.

Why policymakers are reluctant to use them is a pretty fascinating question that I hope to write more on (the essential place to start pondering this question is here), but today I’ll just sketch out the policy levers and make claims about the extent of their under-utilization – and this will alone make this far too long for a blog-post, so sorry about that.

These policy solutions are all premised on the belief that the problems facing the economy today stem from the failure of businesses, households, and government to spend enough money to keep all workers that want a job employed. When the $8 trillion bubble in housing popped, the construction activity and consumer spending associated with it left a gaping hole in overall demand for goods and services that has not yet been filled.

There are basically three policy levers that can be used to help fill this shortfall in demand: fiscal, monetary, and exchange-rate policies. None of them are close to being maxed-out and some are going in precisely the wrong direction one would want if fighting joblessness was actually your top priority. Most strangely, the prevailing conventional wisdom is that it is politically unrealistic indeed – downright naïve, in fact – to call for these levers to be pulled with real force and reduce joblessness. What most voters don’t (but need to) know is that this rock-solid conventional wisdom is utterly at odds with textbook macroeconomics – in fact it’s essentially economic flat-earthism. And yet it’s powerful enough to keep policymakers inert while millions of Americans remain unemployed.

Given that jobs is the topic dominating media coverage this week, here is a quick overview for deciding whether or not a policymaker is genuinely concerned about joblessness or just playing such a concerned policymaker on TV. If they’re really devoted to ending joblessness, they will be talking about these policy levers and how they should be pulled.

Fiscal policy: When business and household spending craters, government spending (and, generally less-effectively, tax cuts) can and should increase to stem the private declines. How much fiscal support should be provided to today’s economy? Currently, the “output gap” is roughly $1 trillion – meaning that this much additional aggregate demand is needed to soak up the resources idled during the recession.

Assuming a reasonable multiplier makes it clear that the economy could absorb at least $600 billion in additional fiscal support in the coming year before it came close to returning to pre-recession unemployment rates. Now, of course this isn’t politically realistic, and that’s a real problem because fiscal support is the lever most guaranteed to work and with sufficient scale to fully solve the jobs-crisis.

This said, policymakers who were genuinely frantic about the problem of joblessness would be talking about the need for more fiscal support and talking on a similar scale. Such policymakers do exist!

Needless to say, policymakers truly frantic about fighting joblessness wouldn’t be slashing at spending in the near-term, or stressing the need for government to “tighten its belt” the way cash-strapped families need to.

Monetary policy:  Normally as the economy enters recession, the Federal Reserve lowers the short-term interest rates that it directly controls. By doing this, they hope to put downward pressure on the longer-term rates that influence business investment in plant and equipment and household spending on big-ticket items like durables and housing. These short-term rates currently sit at (essentially) zero. So it is too often said that the Federal Reserve has “run out of ammunition.”

This is not so. There are a range of things that could still be done. They could launch another round of “large-scale asset purchases” – buying longer-term debt to directly target the interest rates that influence business investment and consumer spending. And they could launch it on a scale that would actually move the economy. They could announce a higher inflation target to provide confidence to households burdened by large debt overhangs that these burdens would lighten over time.

Policymakers who thought this aggressive approach to fighting joblessness was warranted could do more than just call for it (though even that would be a bold act in today’s “realistic” climate) – they could also agitate for the appointment of unemployment hawks to the two vacancies in the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – including recess appointments if confirmation of these unemployment hawks was held up by the Senate. Such talk would, of course, bring stern lectures from purveyors of conventional wisdom about the danger of threatening “central bank independence” – but in fact there is no central bank independence in the current system, there is only insulation from stakeholders that are not the finance sector.

What policymakers not particularly concerned about joblessness will do is complain that the Fed is overreached or has laid the ground for runaway inflation.

Exchange-rate policy: The Swiss government announced this week that too many investors fleeing Euro-denominated assets had begun demanding Franc-denominated ones; the increased demand for Francs pushed up the Swiss currency and made it too expensive for Swiss products to compete on global markets. They vowed to fight this development with the policy tools they had available.

What’s this have to do with us? Well, the U.S. dollar has been over-valued (and continues to be) for years – and remedying this over-valuation in the next couple of years could boost our net exports and jobs. And the overvaluation of the U.S. dollar (unlike that of the Franc) is actually not a case of markets getting panicked – it stems instead from the policy decisions of major trading partners (China, in particular) to keep their own currencies from rising against the dollar by buying hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. assets. In short, the over-valuation of the dollar is now almost entirely driven by policy – so the remedy should be, too.

Such a revaluation of the Chinese currency against the dollar would essentially take aggregate demand from the Chinese economy and give it to U.S. economy. This might sound somehow unfair at first blush, but it turns out that the U.S. needs this demand and China doesn’t. In fact, China in the past year has actually begun raising domestic interest rates and restricting credit to choke off too-rapid demand growth in their economy.

So what would policymakers frantic about joblessness call for in terms of engineering a revaluation of currencies that are pegged too low against the dollar? Take your pick. But they surely would be doing something ; or at the very least something besides saying that a strong dollar is good for the United States.

As we watch President Obama’s speech and Congress’ response, ask yourself if this looks like a group of policymakers who are genuinely frantic about fighting joblessness. If the answer’s ‘yes’, that will be a huge improvement.

Getting ready to watch President Obama present his jobs plan? As you gather the snacks, keep the following scorecard handy to judge this program, and any others you happen upon. We laid out some criteria recently and they are worth reviewing again.

Criterion one: Will the policy make a real difference in job creation in the next 24 months?

The first question that should be asked about a jobs plan is, “Will a sizeable number of jobs be created within two years?” The recessionary labor market has already persisted for three-and-a-half years, and the need to get the unemployment rate on a steep downward trajectory is obvious. Since robust job growth should extend beyond the next 24 months, we should also ask whether a plan will ensure sufficient economic growth to drive steep declines in unemployment beyond 2013.

This criterion is important because some policies already suggested by Congress and the administration will generate jobs too slowly, with little or no impact in the near term—think trade treaties, patent reform, corporate tax reform and so on that might never have much impact on jobs and certainly will not move the dial in the next two years.

Criterion two: Is the policy effective and efficient?

A jobs plan should be an effective use of resources so that each billion dollars in either expenditures or lost revenue generates more jobs than alternative plans. Simply put, some policies offer more bang for the buck. We know from the Congressional Budget Office, academic experts, and private-sector forecasters (Elmendorf 2010; CBO 2011; and Mark Zandi 2010, 2011) what the most effective policy tools for generating jobs are. Generally, tax cuts are weaker than spending to generate jobs and spending on low and moderate income people generates the most jobs (see the appendix of this recent EPI briefing paper for a comparison of the cost effectiveness of various proposed job creation policies).

Criterion three: How is the policy funded?

The most effective job creation policies cannot be “paid for” by higher taxes or other spending cuts in the near term. Effective jobs policy injects money into the economy and increases the overall demand for goods and services, thereby raising the need for more workers to produce those goods and services.

But if a job creation policy must be “budget neutral”—that is, it must be accompanied by a tax increase or budget cut—then the benefits of the spending injected in the economy are diluted at best. So, an effective jobs plan should either be deficit financed or paid for in later years only after the economy is much stronger and has much lower unemployment.

Criterion four: Is the policy at the appropriate scale to produce a substantial number of jobs?

In order to put a significant dent in unemployment and establish a fast trajectory toward low unemployment, the jobs plan must be sufficiently large. As of the second quarter of 2011, the output gap—the shortfall between actual and potential gross domestic product—stood at $1.0 trillion (-6.3 percent), having narrowed from a peak of $1.2 trillion (-8.2 percent) in the second quarter of 2010 as a result of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (Fieldhouse 2011). Halving the output gap would require more than $350 billion in additional fiscal support for this year alone; this is in addition to maintaining current budget policy, including the payroll tax holiday, emergency unemployment benefits, discretionary spending levels, and transportation investments.

Proponents of jobs plans should set clear goals regarding the extent to which unemployment will be reduced over the next two years. While the first three criteria can be used to evaluate individual job creation policies in isolation, this final criterion of scale should be applied instead to a package of job creation policies.