subcommittee i welcome the opportunity to address the job situation and the challenges of long term unemployment because i fear our elected leaders and the chattering classes are accepting the unacceptable that is unemployment will be unacceptabl forseeable future in my view and very little is being done to alter that reality in such circumstances we can expect to have many people unemployed for very long periods of time into exhausted ninety nine weeks of unemployment insurance our nation has no real safety net other than food stamps we must build out our safety net to help those we also need to pursue a vigorous jobs agenda since what the unemployed and the nation needs is to quickly lower unemployment and build a huge jobs hole that's been created so let me go into the job situation the economic growth we face will barely cover the growth of the labor force and it won't lower the unemployment rate much we will see ten percent unemployment year from now over the course of two thousand and ten roughly a third of the workforce and roughly forty percent of minority workers will be unemployed or underemployed at some point during the year even two years from now unemployment will be roughly eight percent a rate higher than the worst moments of the last year recession given this situation is necessary to do much more to generate jobs since it's clear that the private sector as represented lender cited will not be sufficient jobs on its own we will need very fast growth if we're lucky enough to get back to five percent unemployment in two thousand and fifteen let me discuss the deficits for a second to create more jobs in the short on will necessarily mean having higher deficits in the next few years david walker president of the peterson foundation and a well known deficit hawk wrote an op ed with me in february arguing that our short term deficits should not be the focus of concern because they are necessary rather deficit concerns should be focused on the longer term structural deficit we argued that job creation is the immediate priority and this will mean higher deficits in the short term since measures taken now to generate jobs while very little effect on long term deficits one should not invoke fear about deficits as a way to avoid creating jobs now in fact deficit reduction and job creation are complementary strategies creating jobs and more tax payers now is the way to move the fiscal situation to a healthier place let's talk about generating jobs some policymakers seem to be saying that they have no appetite for doing more that they're tired of dealing with job creation and unemployment i daresay that that's true of american families who are certainly tired of having to endure extreme labor market distress with no real end in sight congress should quickly pass the three pieces of job legislation currently being considered the toxic center's bill including the cobra and state assistance that the house  removed to the harkin amendment that will assist in preserving education jobs and three the local jobs for america act introduced by representative miller you should note that the unemployment projections that show will have ten percent unemployment a year from now actually assume that we're going to be having these unemployment insurance and cobra benefits and state relief in their model so doing that doesn't you know will leave us with very high unemployment we need to do much more i think would be great to even provide more relief to states because as they've cut back that's essentially anti stimulus the provisions being can that are all only all sat around a third of the contractionary effects of state cutbacks let's talk about assisting the long term unemployed many will be exhausting their benefits their ninety nine weeks around three million this year alone the rest of the safety net has come to look more like a cement floor tanna has been respond responsive to the recession and michigan are hardest hit state case loads are down even though we have extreme unemployment food stamps thanks to the recovery act have been made available without the normal three month limit for able bodied adults without the pendants and case folks have increased but the average benefit is slight and doesn't really do enough by the end of two thousand and eleven we will the labor department estimates at thirteen million americans will exhaust all entitlement to unemployment compensation even if half of them find jobs that six million who will exhaust with no source of income i recommend that congress either have another tier of us in very high hard hit states or a enacted special means tested program of emergency cash assistance until sufficient jobs are created the number of long term jobless americans who has also their unemployment compensation will continue to soar i urge you not to turn your backs on them in their time of need we cannot accept the unacceptable we must generate millions more jobs and get unemployment moving sharply downward and we must help those not able to locate work because of circumstances they do not control and i to thank mr linden for quoting me saying that the private sector is not healthy and i look forward to engaging you on the issues of why we have the high deficits we have and what role they play in the economy thank you we have record high long term unemployment because there simply aren't enough jobs to go around the economy has been growing for three quarters now but businesses have not yet begun to ramp up hiring there are nearly five workers seeking every job opening available compared to a ratio of about one point five to one before the great recession began long term unemployment create significant hardships for individual families and it also threatens our nascent economic recovery the long term unemployed can't spend what they don't earn and spending is what keeps our economy humming consumer spending is of course further constrained due to the collapse of the housing bubble and the fact that families were highly leveraged before the great recession began there are some key principles that i urge you to keep in mind when you're developing policies to help the long term unemployed first we need to acknowledge that there's a new face of the long term unemployed who have different problems from workers in prior recessions the great recession is of course the first major recession where the typical family is a dual earner household more often than not out there in america today the situation is that he's lost his job but it's and it's not coming back soon in their community but she still has her so it's now a classic  in the hand is worth two in the bush people looking for work in their local economy or does she quit her job and they move and both search for work but of course families are less noble overall because of the increase in homeowners who are underwater on their mortgage mortgages las t year geographic mobility fell to historic lows although it's bounced back up slightly in two thousand and nine to address these policies congress should focus on three policy goals first we need to stop adding to the problem of unemployment we need to help the long term unemployed beat the odds and find work and third for the other folks in the unemployed q for whom a job is not available we need to find national jobs programs to stop the flow of workers into unemployment congress should seek to expand the work sharing program to kind of kept unemployment from rising in germany even though their output has fallen more so than in the united states the unemployment system has a short time compensation program they come to congress could encourage the expansion of congress should also have the temerity to keep recovery dollars flowing and tell the recovery actually takes hold we should be looking into fixing the unemployment insurance system in a variety of ways but one of them should also include making sure that we don't cut off benefits before local economies recover such as using state by state off trigger rush rather than a national cutoff date we must also maintain benefits to budget constraint states and localities that are as we speak adding to our unemployment one that was by laying off teachers and police officers to help the unemployed find work policymakers should look to improve our employment services address the challenges of the collapse of the housing bubble for those who need to move for work and support workers who may need to take lower paying jobs in the interim but to help those for whom jobs are simply not available congress should consider the need to create and expand job programs including those outlined in the jobs for america act as well as increasing funds for national service programs some are you jobs program and continuing the tanach emergency funds that are putting people to work in partnership with private employers i want to stress that helping the long term unemployed is not just about doing right by america's families although that is certainly important and i'd like to add we too have heard from many of those same long term unemployed folks after you made the announcement for this hearing and those stories are really quite troubling getting the long term unemployed back to work is critical for our economy and for the general welfare of our nation and the public agrees an overwhelming seventy four percent of americans agree with the statement quote with unemployment close to ten percent and millions still out of work it is too early to start cutting back benefits and health coverage for workers who lose their jobs that's from a poll that just came out this week more than a point in the decade since the end of world war two the challenge of laying the foundation for a strong economy lies with you and this body of government it continues to be the case that fiscal policy is the primary lever that the federal government has its disposal to spur economic growth unlike in prior recessions where there was more room for monetary policy these extraordinary times do call for continued extraordinary action counts of economic advisers christina romer said just last month quote it would be penny wise pound foolish to try to deal with our long run problem by tightening fiscal policy immediately or foregoing additional emergency spending to reduce unemployment and cutting back now will certainly dampen the nascent economic recovery is deficit debate is often portrayed as having the goal of saving today's young workers from future debt but as my written testimony goes into these very same workers if left to flounder in a high millions of individuals have lost their jobs by now an unusually large number of job losers has been unemployed for over six months judging from experience in past recessions the consequences of layoffs or job losses are severe the average mature worker losing a stable job the consequence of job loss also felt by workers children who can suffer from the consequences even as adults and by their families these costs tend to be greater for the long term unemployed the long term unemployed experience a larger declines in earnings are more likely to drop out of the labor force  more likely to end up in poverty especially if they're from one earner households with children in the following i will talk about five potential areas of government policy to assist laid off workers and the long term unemployed indicated by these and related findings in the short extension unemployment insurance can alleviate part of the immediate earnings loss associated with job loss and unemployment thereby also provide a degree of demand civilization much needed economic stimulus extension of unemployment insurance are affected raising employment prospects of the long term unemployed now of course and this condition to help the long term unemployed find employment to stimulate job creation yet recent research has shown that laid off workers in the long term unemployed have difficulty finding a job and suffer from low earnings even once the economy improves the rising tide lifts many but definitely not all vote to help the long term unemployed to find a job and improving labor market three types of programs have shown to be able to achieve lasting increas employment while potentially saving money for the on a bomb in a jar and these jobs such as system retraining programs and reemployment bonuses to find a new job workers laid off in a recession may need to reorient their career goals jobs such assistance can help with is uncertain and time consuming proper process by providing access to dob listings but also by providing information on a few patients or industries or regions with promises of job prospects various types of jobs there are systems provided currently within the unemployment insurance system in the us and in other countries have been shown to be efficient and cost effective the ad research also suggests that the current infrastructure say of one stop career centers could be much improved and extended to provide more efficient cost effective  to reorient or restart their careers and improve their job prospects someone employed workers will have to acquire new skills some training some training programs have been shown to be more efficient and cost effective raising employment than others for example while completing technical training appears to be helpful for many workers training in non technical subjects less promising us proper counseling of workers and subsidising the right kind of training a likely to be important aspect in any effort to effectively retrain the long term unemployed in the raise employment third for some workers a long period may lapse especially for older workers before they find a new job these workers may have lost motivation hope or a realistic view of what wages suspect in the labor market is targeted to workers most likely to exhaust unemployment insurance benefits bonuses that pay workers to finding a new job can reconnect the long term unemployed the labor force they can raise employment and they can reduce the cost to the unemployment insurance system an advantage of these policies that i just discussed is that they have been evaluated and implemented within the current unemployment insurance system of course these policies cannot substitute for a rise in job creation but there was ample represent a potentially important complement to make sure the long term unemployed and to finance of the unemployment insurance system both benefit quickly from the onset of an economic ascent expansion unfortunately current research also suggested government policy is less effective in helping to alleviate the large lasting with the option and wages that eventually fall important consequences the first is that given the increasing evidence that the children of of job losers and of long term unemployed can suffer even when they're in their adult lives it may be worth thinking a policy of how to help the children of unemployed workers for example the current system of financial aid to college could be expanded to prevent especially low income students to drop out of college because they can't find a job to finance their studies or similar for young workers not bound to college some form of individual training at college may help them to complete training and sort of jump start a career that very much now is beaten down by the labor market second given the difficulties of helping job loses an unemployed workers recover from a long term earnings loss after the fact it may be worthwhile to explore available options to reduce large scale layoffs in the future one way to avert such layoffs would be to implement programs such as work sharing as have been discussed before also short term short time compensation that would prevent a decline in spending power but for it to happen is devoted to dislocation and long lasting or any loss of laid off workers and it may be cost effective from society's point of view for example the cost of unemployment insurance benefits for a typical worker is a small fraction of the total earnings lost over the remainder of an individual's working life if the same benefits were paid during employment to avoid job loss this would substantially reduce the cost of recession and why the cost effective policies may be available to help reemploy the longtime unemployed the potential for policy intervention to significantly aid recovery of long term earnings the plan appears less promising given these large and long term costs preventive measures to avoid currently have deficits g d p ratios above ten percent typically three percent level where eyebrows to be razed course this is the classic keynesian response to an economic downturn when demand from the private sector falters government must fill the gap and keep the economy from collapse the irony is that just three short years ago such activists fiscal policy was considered by the vast majority of economists an intellectual dead end history of the a substantial body of empirical research has shown fiscal stimuli are largely ineffective at healing an ailing economy therefore fighting the business cycle again was viewed by ninety nine percent of economists was a job that if it was to be done at all was best left to central bankers policies dealing with taxing and spending simply have too many variables to account for increases in government spending can crowd out those of the private sector changing tax rates dramatically alters behavior expanded safety nets can cause people to behave far differently than if those nets were not in place secretary of treasury robert ruben deliver the eulogy when he claimed that surplus is not deficit stimulate the economy by keeping interest rates low historically as i'm an economic historian discredited notion that massive deficits such as those we've seen in the past two years could help an economy europe on the experiences during the great depression and world war two economies return to full employment only after massive wartime deficits were deployed in the united states the wartime deficit to g d p ratio was about twenty five percent during the one nine hundred forty s during the war and about twice what it is today and unemployment fell from around fourteen percent in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine to around two percent during the war time but does this economic experience during world war two really provide evidence in favor of keynesian fiscal policy the true lesson from that era and a lesson that i think is relevant today lies in the experience of one thousand nine hundred sixty year that the massive wartime stimulus was dramatically with on wound the keynesian economists of the day argued forcefully that if the government simply disbanded the army to stop producing armaments after the war that unemployment would rise back to depression era levels back to forecast range anywhere between twelve and thirty five percent in one thousand nine hundred six despite these warnings the government sent most soldiers home cancelled work contracts removed wartime economic controls and government spending fell from eighty four largest and fastest turnaround from deficit to surplus in our nation's history and here's the kicker despite the widespread predictions of economic armageddon unemployment remained under four and a half percent between  drop like a stone how did this happen when markets adjusted quickly and efficiently once they were finally unfettered most economists today acknowledged the constant intervention during the one nine hundred thirty s extended the length and depth of the great depression and  here's the lesson just as economists have have long asserted that keynesian fiscal policy is ineffective at creating jobs or boosting g d p it's also true that the withdrawal of a fiscal stimulus likewise need not mean job losses do in the economy when you're giving money to people who are going to spend it because they have exhausted their assets they're not going to be saving they're not investing they're going to be spending in the economy the u i extensions over the course of a year provide support for around eight hundred to nine hundred thousand jobs and in fact the unemployment insurance system because it goes up in a recession the actually even the regular year why is probably responsible for another half a million eight hundred deficits for the long term creates a lot of jobs in the short run and it really helps people who are being hurt so if i only had one thing to do that's what i would add to that i mean i think that i certainly agree with my colleague dr michelle  the on the importance of you i we've been talking a lot about how you turn the system off and one of the challenges with these extensions is that they have a national cutoff date so that every state no matter what their unemployment rate is they all go off at the same time and so i think it is important to think about making sure that remain in high unemployment and i would define it a little bit lower than than dr michel would maybe around you know seven half a percent that those states keep extending benefits even as the national economy recovers that will help those local labor market but the other thing is i would add to that list in terms of a second priority the continued ending in terms of i mean really you've got to you've got two things here right i think what the economists what we're telling you is that the most important thing you can do for very long term unemployed changing the rules a little bit so that those people get back to work sooner than they otherwise would love to for the operation labor market would definitely help quite a bit would help with some  big ticket items reforming the system on experience rating question remember that even before the recession began we had unemployment i think california is about six or six and half percent so we've got to deal with that system i think your point about foreclosures is actually very good for the housing market the labor markets are much more intertwined and they used to be you look at the areas that have the highest unemployment counties or whatever they're also the ones with the highest foreclosure rates we're going to second what my colleague said i would of extend unemployment insurance but i would also add an exit strategy that could take two forms first of all intensify such a system and put a bit more money into possibly intensive services such as we training so get the message out there that why people are looking for jobs or not finding jobs they should prepare themselves for the new labor market that's come and at the same time look at some of the extended unemployment insurance money as a reemployment bonus uncertainty small stimulus may be ok but i think at some point the stimulus gets to be so large that it's really government induced fear and panic when people see the sticker shock numbers of a one point six trillion dollar deficit  government doing doing so much that it's some point there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear on the side of businesses that you know i don't know what's going on here you know i'm not sure if i should invest in a new a new small still working amazingly well or do we need more of it because we've been thrown into the worst economic downturn a major loss of demand caused by the policies of laissez economics deregulation and the bush administration which by the time the first stimulus even took effect the unemployment rate was already eight point six percent with job losses being seven hundred fifty thousand a month that's why i don't understand your point that if the same was working it would have been you know i don't plan would have been below eight percent the ministration was wrong in its forecasts of what the baseline was so was i absolutely but i don't think they were wrong and i don't think i'm wrong about the effect of the stimulus on creating jobs i think it's created more than two and a half million jobs now when you have a giant giant hole you can throw a lot of dirt into it and it doesn't mean you've actually filled the hole so i think that we are seeing the end of the stimulus this year and in fact if we don't do more we're going to be seeing ten percent unemployment a year from now and what i hear from the minority what i hear from your witness is basically do nothing if you actually pressed dr taylor on the end and ask him how you're going to get jobs it's really people should take wage and businesses make decisions based on a predictable future and right now with all the government activity there is nothing predictable i think yeah absolutely i would agree with that did they're also very concerned about demand they're very concerned about where they're going to see their customers come from and i think that one of the challenges in this particular moment in this particular economic cycle is it because we know that recessions caused by financial crises like saw here in the united states are deeper and more protracted and i think uncertainty is an important issue as you're talking about but i think a lot of businesses are wondering where my consumer is going to come from i'm looking out in a community with massively high unemployment and looking at a community where there's millions of people who are underwater in their homes they can't tap into home equity lines i'm looking at communities where there just simply isn't a sense of where demand going to come from so i think that thinking about making sure that consumers have cash in their pockets that  borrowed for my kids college fund families gaijin debt all the time and so do countries the question is not whether debt is good or bad the question is whether the debt is being used for productive purposes for the point let's talk about unemployment insurance and that's one thing that we're that we're talking about here i would acknowledge that unemployment insurance provides a positive benefit security safety net for americans who lose who lose their jobs there's a positive side of that but i think it few more months while they continue to collect unemployment insurance they'll get a better opportunity that's the cost side and there's a cost not just in terms of tax dollars but in terms of people postponing taking a job or not looking  now we need to find what is the optimal amount of unemployment entered the optimal time twenty six weeks and i don't pretend to know what it is twenty six weeks has been traditionally the optimal time that we give unemployment insurance during recessions we might extend it to thirty nine weeks or even fifty two weeks but at some point though i think we ought to agree that there has to be a point where staying in another week has more negative costs then it does benefits again those costs not just being in terms of tax dollars but in terms of people postponing employment that they otherwise would have would have taken now i believe that after you know with where we are now we have exceeded we've gone past that limit that i don't pretend to know where that optimal time is maybe it's fifty two weeks maybe thirty nine maybe it's twenty six but i don't think it's ninety nine i think we're not we're past  longer employment to a distortion effect quite small in good times in bath times it isn't really individuals don't search effort and you have five people per job that lets them to be unemployed longer so i don't think there is actually such a negative consequences of money for their very worthy cause or extending a tax credit that will help their specific industry or business and i find that the ultimate irony as they're demanding that we cut the deficit they want need for their own particular purposes which are all very worthy and important just to boost it up a little because it's going to create jobs so i'm not sure that i'm not you know caught in the middle of this where i'm hearing you  know what you have to do and i don't care what it is and you know cut the taxes and cut the spending but not for this one because this one is going to be what's going to help us get out of this recession as far as i'm concerned and i don't think it would take a genius to figure this one o stimulus whether it created five million jobs jobs jobs saved the state of nevada so i'm very grateful for that stimulus and if i had a vote on it again today with all the negative publicity i would vote on it again i'm going to share with you the particular plight of the people that i represent are finding themselves facing right now if this hearing was held two years ago i would have been sitting here e thinking these people just don't know all they need to do is legalize gaming in their area and they would be awash in money and nobody would have a problem and nobody would be unemployed and nobody would be losing their homes but june of two thousand and ten and let me tell you what my the people that i represent in las vegas are facing we have the second highest unemployment rate in the country it's over fourteen percent it went up last month comes to mind one out of twenty two homes is in foreclosure which is terribly despite the stabilizing not only for the families that are being forced to leave their homes but for the entire community and the tax you know it's been devastating we have a one industry state and i certainly have a one industry district the gaming industry here too for in the last four and a half decades that my family has lived in las vegas leaves an economic boom and a building boom the likes of which this nation has never seen but when the crash came it affected us very disproportionate way now i know some of the suggestions are job training but what would my people train for  these people by and large not entirely we have a very low college graduation rate because after you graduate high school you can go to work or in the past you've gone to work in the hotels and made a pretty good living my father has a ninth grade education he had a good school to help his family out during the depression then we moved to las vegas a job as a waiter and a waiter salary he made enough money to put a roof over our head moved on the table clothes on have not done new year early nearly enough and so while that is really in the basket of treasury it's not in your jurisdiction i think there are some things that you can do to encourage them to decrease principal from home for homeowners when has gone by the bank but if that person stays there and they pay rent that's good for the community it's good for the homeowner it's good for your community that would be the second thing that i would recommend you think about  linder earlier quoted some newspapers from detroit about the employer who said he couldn't get some people to work because they were on unemployment insurance but i just wonder how that person could have possibly have a job opening because there's a lot of people not only knew why we're out looking for work people come into the labor market for the first time that can't possibly be that the job openings are going on filled because of you why in my  one would wonder one would wonder why they person doesn't raise the wages he's offering to people in order to attract workers ok so it's hard for me to believe that unemployment insurance is having a measurable impact on the level of unemployment we have especially when you consider them the macro economic benefit the fact that the spending actually creates jobs so whatever small disincentive effect there may have on at in this extreme situation is swapped in my view by the benefits of injecting spending in the economy so in fact you know the people that are out there that are suffering they need your action they didn't ask for this situation it's not their fault we have you know seventeen percent of the people are underemployed we're going to have a third of the workforce underemployed or unemployed at some point during this year this is a horrible situation and they asked for it you know it's your job and duty and i think you're willing to step up to in fact do things that are going to create jobs but in the meanwhile provide relief to them to be able to get through this i would point to two pieces of evidence one we have five job seekers out there seeking every job available compared to one and a half job seekers for every job available prior to the great recession began and that's irrefutable evidence that there are too many people chasing not enough jobs the second bit of evidence i would point to is that we have a can't do math in my head right now but we have a trillion or something like that gap in what our economy should be producing compared to what we are actually producing today so there's a big gap in demand and there are millions of unemployed workers out there taking employment and high share of long term unemployed that this country's ever seen so when somebody says we're not doing enough i say to them well we  consumers that drive our economy until we get those long term unemployed back to work we're all not going to be doing well and seven million who are long term unemployed thank you mentioned mr mcdermott only about four people four four million four half million people are unemployment insurance so clearly we're not doing enough there's just too many people who aren't covered by unemployment insurance and first place unlike many other countries second piece of evidence is we have had a huge acceleration in the number of people who are in voluntarily part time for economic reasons nine million one thing that could be done is to send a signal to the unemployed are really needed and that they're expected to come back to work as soon as the economy picks up so what unemployment insurance does not give a disincentive to work but the long employment spells lead people to be discouraged so one thing that could be part of unemployment insurance i mentioned earlier is an incorporated exit strategy signal so people be prepared and soon as you find a job we're going to help use of a bonus to access but that is not only good for that one insurance system because people move off their all of us soon as the economy picks up but it also sends a psychological message to people we want you to keep searching we wanted to keep retraining you want you to be ready to get that job and we're going to subsidize you to do it and that's cost effective  and i agree that your long term unemployment is healthy for for workers and we've heard a lot about that but i think you know if we look at the data correlation is not necessary causality but if you look at the percent of people that have been around eleven percent that number never got above twenty five percent of workers who were unemployed were unemployed for for twenty seven weeks or twenty six weeks or longer so you wonder if the fact that unemployment insurance has been extended for up to ninety nine weeks now there's certainly a correlation there that we've seen unprecedented spike in in eligibility for unemployment for longer times and there's an unprecedented spike in terms of the number of people that are employed long term i don't think it's the only factor this recession has mitigating factors as well but i think that we have to acknowledge that at least as part of the cause of why we see so many people who are long term unemployed and all the negative side effects that come with that is this constant extension of unemploy all of the people that are losing their jobs on the gulf coast i saw a case in the news two or three days ago but as a man who had been working as a fisherman for years save these people one thing that i read in this morning's wall street journal was that the administration is making the case that b p should be paying the salaries of the oil rig workers who are being furloughed because of plot a path forward as we think about the labor force regaining its vitality and the job growth rate going up as we come out of the recession one problem that we haven't gotten our hands around is the persistent attrition of the educational system at every level we talk about the dropout rate fairly familiar topic of conversation and it's forty percent some communities fifty percent of the community there's another set of problems when we graduate young people from high school and they don't drop out but graduate and most only about fifty five to sixty percent of them go on to college so even the young men and women who are graduating in five years one of the things that it seems we've got to get a handle around if we really want to reconstitute a stronger labor force is the fact that a lot of men and women under prepared to adjust to new jobs that may come into their community and i want to get your reaction to that second observation you touched on this one of the errors that congress made with respect to the stimulus we gave the states out of flexibility over who they cover in terms of unemployment benefits and there are still a notable number of states in the country like about twenty three don't cover part time workers state happens to be one of those and this is not just a partisan issue by the way we have republican governors who oppose altering the unemployment benefit laws in my states to cover part time workers but  you know the legislature has the right to reverse that we have an overwhelmingly democratic legislature that still refuse to do anything about it twenty three states cover by a large moral hazard issues i guess around extending unemployment benefits but i haven't heard any of you speak about who are the long term unemployed who are they demographically how recent is work history how many of them have a work how many of them are people who are suffering some kind of dysfunction that's probably beyond the course of government power to remedy are they in particular kinds of industries are they coming out of particular kinds of industries who are the long term unemployed because it seems to me to speak to what the solutions are but if you want to tackle that set of observations or questions thank you first on the idea of  you know i'm very much for making sure that everybody who graduates high school and wants to go to college and has an opportunity complete college and we should find ways to make that happen  i would note however that the problem we're facing now has nothing to do with the fact that people don't have skills for the jobs that are out there the problem is we don't have enough jobs and if you ask who are the long term unemployed  doctor has some evidence in her testimony i have others there's a large share of every occupation an industry has produced unemployed people that are long term unemployed there's a as larger share of the college graduates and people with advanced degrees that are unemployed as they're basically are for those with a high school degree so the fact is no matter who you are what age you are what race you are or what education you have if you lost a job in the last few years it's a very good probability that you're going to be long term unemployed so i think you know that's an important thing to add one more thing on the college thing and then i'll let my colleagues speak right now they work force we have that are employed around thirty one percent have a college degree or an advanced degree and imported to give everybody a chance to go to college i think the problem is not in this country we don't have enough people completing college it's really access who are the people who get to go to college not the total number of people going to college because it's unlikely in the next ten years that we're going to have even thirty five or forty percent of the workforce employed with a college degree in jobs that require a college degree so the challenge is how to get people access to college but it's also how to make sure that even those people who don't have a college degree have access to a good paying job thank you yeah thank  concern especially in a recession because many children from poor families finance their education by having a job that job is now taken by more skilled workers who are unemployed and that's why they're going to drop out second college financial aid is based on the last last ten forty of their parents if the parents get laid off in college they're going to get less financial aid but these are two areas where there's actually possible improvements that can be done and over here looking article in usa today yesterday there was a woman who graduated from college she has eighty thousand dollars in debt and she's making twelve dollars an hour answering telephones now and she's basically thinking about filing for bankruptcy