Editorial: Learning loss is bad everywhere, and demands immediate action
With only two weeks of the new fiscal year ending, we are still reeling. In one year, we are seeing thousands of Americans lose their jobs and in another year thousands more will lose theirs.
Our latest report reveals that in the month of September, a total of 3,984 manufacturing plants nationwide closed, 2,839 of them as a direct result of last year’s sequester. This includes 2,741 in the U.S. and 1,027 in Canada representing 7.2% of the nation’s output and 1,611 in China, an additional 1.2%, representing 2.8% of the nation’s total output. The United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands alone lost 1,716 plants in September, representing 4.7% of output, and 12 of the 14 European Union nations with their own currency lost production.
These closures resulted in a nearly 75% reduction in manufacturing activity, at a time when the U.S. is already in the sixth year of his budget sequestration. To put this in simple terms, this means that the sequester would cut $1,008 billion from our economy, costing us at least 11,000 more jobs over the next year. When these job losses are factored into the overall national cost of dealing with unemployment, which currently stands at 8.3%, our economy will lose 6.2 million jobs. And this is just what has been factored in so far (the U.S. currently has a cumulative unemployment rate of 12.7%, and the number of affected jobs being estimated by this latest report is 3,984 – 5 million jobs lost).
In truth, however, the sequester will not only cut jobs to an already terrible number, it will also cut them off at the knees. In order to make the sequester cuts truly effective and sustainable, they have been scaled back to $85 billion, less than 1% of what was cut by the