Recovery Act Saves Jobs in Pennsylvania
One year ago, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law, creating thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania.
According to an article on PRNewswire, in Pennsylvania, the success of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is clear. It has preserved 84,000 Pennsylvania jobs, according to a report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Extended unemployment and food stamp benefits have kept Pennsylvanians who lost their jobs from losing everything. Those benefits, coupled with the Making Work Pay tax cut, put money back into Pennsylvania communities and businesses when they needed it most. A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that 189,000 Pennsylvanians were kept out of poverty last year as a result of these types of benefits in the Recovery Act.
“The Recovery Act is working in Pennsylvania and across the nation,” said Mark Price, Ph.D., Labor Economist for the Keystone Research Center. “But our work is not done. Thousands of Pennsylvanians still don’t have enough work. Our elected leaders need to muster the political courage to act decisively again and pass a ‘Main Street Jobs Act’ in Pennsylvania and in Washington D.C.”
“As we think about policies for the future, we need to remember why the economy nosedived in the first place,” Dr. Herzenberg added. “Deregulated financial markets and unsustainable consumer borrowing against inflated home values were two big causes of economy’s woes. For the American economy to recover permanently, we need to address these root causes by reregulating financial markets and lifting middle-class incomes.”
“Our elected leaders took decisive steps one year ago today to shore up an economy in free fall like no other time since the Great Depression,” said Stephen Herzenberg, Ph.D., an Economist and Executive Director of the Keystone Research Center. “Absent that action, unemployment today could easily be 15% on its way to 20%, and we’d find ourselves in the grips of another Depression.”
PRNewswire said that at the state level, Pennsylvania should tap into more than $600 million in additional federal dollars for unemployment benefits, emergency assistance for at-risk families, and grants for workers idled by the recession to learn new skills at community college.
© 2010