In one sense, this is a good thing:

In the strongest employment report since the recession began nearly two years ago, the government said Friday that the nation’s employers had all but stopped shedding jobs in November, taking some of the pressure off of President Obama to come up with a wide-ranging jobs creation program.

   But it is bordering on insanity to assume that we are anywhere near something approaching a decent economic picture–and I define decent as an economy at–hold your breathe for this term–FULL EMPLOYMENT in which people make good wages. We are no where near that picture. And so the good news makes me worry that people will feel like the crisis is over.

   It has to be said first that, yes, it didn’t get even worse because of the Administration’s actions, particularly the passage of the $787 billion stimulus bill. But, let’s consider just these four points, for brevity sake:

   1. The stimulus bill was far too small. And the effects of it are going to run out–at which point construction companies are going to start cutting jobs again.

   2. When the Federal Reserve Board is projecting weak job growth for the next FIVE YEARS, that is, in effect, an eternity in the Fed’s life–think of it like dog years.

   3. No one is truly addressing WAGE GROWTH. We still are in a world which is suffering the effects of a 30-year growth in productivity during which wages essentially stayed flat in real terms.

   4. One in four children are on food stamps. I’ll say it again because people should repeat this every time you hear an attack on government: ONE IN FOUR CHILDREN ARE ON FOOD STAMPS.

    Respectully, when the president says that we don’t have much money left in the government till to help Americans, what we should hear is this: our economy will not change. I say this with no joy but for a Democratic president to say we will continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on immoral and senseless military conflict and, at the same time, adopt the notion that we should be worried about a deficit (which in relative terms is entirely manageable) at a time when the people are crying out for bold action, and appear to be endorsing a phony deficit-cutting commission (which is simply a tool to let a whole bunch of people eviscerate Medicare, one of the most successful programs in our nation’s history, and decline to say to the wealthiest people in our society that they now need to step up to the plate and pay a fair share of the dues it takes to run a functioning democracy…this is not the change I voted for.