- Oil spill response

- Clean energy job creation

- A title to “reduce oil consumption”

- A “broader” title, which he’s working on with the Finance Committee, and which will address the utilities sector. No details on whether it’ll include a cap on emissions, but he said it would deal with “pollution.”

More to come…

Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) (WDCpix)

There is unemployment, and then there is long-term unemployment. As Congress grapples this month with ways to tackle the nation’s jobless crisis, many economists are hoping lawmakers recognize the distinction.

Not only is there often a stigma associated with being out of work for long stretches, but the long-term unemployed are also more likely to have lost a competitive step in their field, requiring focused retraining programs more nuanced than simply throwing federal dollars to existing industries. Many other workers will discover that the task they’ve spent a lifetime doing is no longer relevant on the other side of the recession.

[Economy1]“The longer you remain unemployed, the tougher it is to get a job,” said Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com. “Your skills atrophy. Employers — rightly or wrongly — take that as a signal that you’re damaged goods.”

The combination of factors presents a dilemma, not only for jobless folks in search of work, but also for the Washington lawmakers trying to stoke the coals of hiring. That long-term unemployment is at the highest level since recording began in 1948 only adds to the urgency of getting the policy right.

“It’s a hard question for policymakers,” said Chad Stone, chief economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There aren’t a lot of things they can do quickly.”

Not that they aren’t trying. The House in December passed a $154 billion jobs bill, including billions of dollars in highway infrastructure, public transit and emergency help for struggling states. Few observers, however, gave that proposal much chance of passing the Senate, where Republicans have been pushing for a smaller bill with a greater emphasis on tax cuts. Indeed, on Thursday Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the leaders of the powerful Finance Committee, introduced a jobs bill of their own. The $85 billion draft proposal is centered around a series of business tax breaks designed to spur hiring and individual tax relief designed to encourage spending.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was quick to dismiss the proposal, arguing that it was too heavy on Republican sweeteners and too light on actual job-creation provisions. “The message is so watered down,” he said. The final product, though, is certain to look more like the Baucus-Grassley draft than the bill passed by the House.

Some economists are warning, however, that tax provisions like those in the Senate bill pretend that the jobless pool is a level playing field, ignoring the stigma and skills questions associated with the long-term unemployed — and therefore favoring those who lost jobs more recently. ”Someone who’s been unemployed only 6 or 8 weeks often looks like a much stronger job candidate than someone who hasn’t been employed for the last 66 or 68 weeks,” said economist Gary Burtless, formerly with the Labor Department and now at the Brookings Institution.

Desmond Lachman, economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed, arguing that policymakers should be drafting their legislative fix in recognition that the nation’s jobless crisis is historically long-term. ”There is a distinction to be made,” Lachman said. “Policy needs to concentrate on retraining the long-term unemployed. Those who are short-term unemployed can rejoin the labor force more easily. They would benefit from policies that got the economy moving again and that subsidized employment through tax credits [among other things].”

The $787 billion economic stimulus, enacted last winter, included billions of dollars for new job training. Economists are largely in agreement, however, that the package wasn’t large enough to address the recession. Another pickle: deciding which jobs merit retraining is never easy. It leaves lawmakers with the task of trying to distinguish which occupations were shed as a result of the recession, and which were lost due to deeper structural shifts governing the ever-changing economy in the age of increasing globalization. In short, some experts warn, not all retraining is created equal. “There’s a mismatch between the skills these people have and the skills we need moving forward,” Faucher said. “Retraining won’t do any good if the demand isn’t there.”

The comments are timely. Even as the nation’s jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent last month — down from 10 percent in December — that headline-grabbing figure disguised a deeper problem: Namely, the number of American workers who’ve been unemployed longer than 27 weeks hit another all-time high of 6.3 million in January — up 183,000 since December and 5 million since the start of the recession in December 2007.  And that doesn’t count the roughly 2.5 million folks who want to work but have stopped looking.

The National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, lent a bit of context to those numbers, pointing out recently that the average stretch of unemployment has topped 30 weeks — a full nine weeks longer than the most recent severe jobs crisis in 1983. Another dismal milestone: more than 41 percent of jobless Americans have been without a job for longer than six months, NELP noted, up from 26 percent in 1983. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the economy has shed roughly 8.4 million jobs.

It’s a trend that threatens the economy in a number of ways. Not only do the long-term unemployed consume less, but they’re also more likely to foreclose on their homes — a situation that only cripples recovery efforts by depressing the housing market even further.

The White House seems to be well aware of the hurdles ahead. On Thursday, the administration issued its annual economic outlook, warning that long-term unemployment — and the skills lost as workers sit idle — can lead to a reduction in productivity and earning power, even long after the economy rebounds. The White House estimated that the economy will begin creating jobs this spring, though not in significant enough numbers to keep up with the labor pool, which grows by 100,000-150,000 workers each month. Indeed, Moody’s Economy.com is predicting the nation’s unemployment rate will jump back up near 11 percent later this year.

For his part, Brookings’ Burtless suggested that the depth of the crisis demands a public jobs program on the level of the Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration — which employed 3.3 million people in 1936 — or the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act under Jimmy Carter, which grew to 725,000 public jobs in 1978. The political reality, however, is that today’s Congress is much too conservative to endorse such large, government-backed programs, even despite the stagnant jobs picture the country faces.

So why did Baucus oppose the EPW bill, and why does he want to tinker with the legislation in Finance so much? According to the Sunlight Foundation, part of the answer could lie in the company he keeps:

Baucus will likely have a lot of input coming in from outside his office as twelve of his former staffers, including four former chiefs of staff, work as lobbyists for organizations with an explicit interest in climate legislation. [...]

Many of the organizations represented by former staffers of Baucus are generally supportive of a climate bill, but are seeking certain provisions to be included or not removed during the committee process. Others are engaged in outward opposition.

To be sure, this is far from scandalous: many former Hill staffers move on to lucrative positions on K Street. But given Baucus’ somewhat recalcitrant stand on health care in the context of heavy donations from the insurance industry, it’s reasonable to suspect that the energy industry — chock-full of old Baucus buddies — will have at least some sway as Baucus takes up climate legislation.

Sunlight has a full chart of the twelve lobbyists, along with a relationship map, here.

By the way, the Finance Committee will hold its first hearing on climate legislation tomorrow, and the witness list isn’t exactly a who’s who of environmentalists:

Mr. Abraham Breehey, Director, Legislative Affairs, International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, Department of Government Affairs, Fairfax, VA

Ms. Carol Berrigan, Director, Industry Infrastructure, Nuclear Energy Institute, Washington, DC

Dr. Kenneth P. Green, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC

Dr. Margo Thorning, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, American Council for Capital Formation, Washington, DC

Ms. Van Ton-Quinlivan, Director,Workforce Development and Strategic Programs, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, San Francisco, CA

Wyden, who for years has pushed an enormous health reform strategy of his own — one that would move the country away from employer-sponsored care — tried unsuccessfully last week to attach an amendment granting employees cash vouchers to shop around for insurance plans in lieu of signing blindly to their companies’ plan.

“More needs to be done to hold insurance companies accountable, to hold premiums down for the American people,” Wyden said in an interview Sunday. “I want to continue these discussions.”

Wyden, the Post says, is in “intensive talks” with White House officials and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to tweak the bill.

Rockefeller, meanwhile, has been among the most vocal Senate proponents of the public plan, a government-administered insurance option to compete with private insurers. Proposals to create such a plan fell twice during the Finance Committee’s debate, though Rockefeller and others have vowed to try again when the bill hits the chamber floor. Indeed, amendment opportunities (not to mention pressure from the White House) will probably be enough to convince both Wyden and Rockefeller to vote the bill out of the committee later this week.

The health reform bill moving through the finance panel this week would create private health care cooperatives, but it excludes a public plan to compete with private companies, a high priority for many Democrats.

Baucus said he still needs to work out the order, and some substantial issues, surrounding those amendments.

“We don’t have time today to bring that up,” Baucus said.

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More reactions to the Baucus bill today. Four key moderate senators — Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and the most key moderate senator, Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) — penned a statement praising Baucus’ efforts. “We are encouraged by his commitment to work with both Democrats and Republicans in the Finance Committee,” they wrote, “and believe there is a responsibility for both sides of the aisle to work together to develop a bill that will earn strong support from the full Senate.”

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), on the other hand, took a swipe at Baucus, claiming that Baucus could have had a bipartisan bill if he hadn’t rushed the process. “Another couple weeks would have given us an opportunity to have a bipartisan bill that I think would have gotten broad-based support,” he told CNBC this morning.

Baucus may be touting the Congressional Budget Office’s score of his bill, but he can’t be too happy about the CBO’s assessment of the role of co-ops in the legislation. “The proposed co-ops had very little effect on the estimates of total enrollment in the exchanges or federal costs because, as they are described in the specifications, they seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country or to noticeably affect federal subsidy payments,” the CBO wrote.

For a summary of where the competing health care bills in the House and Senate will go from here, take a look at this post from The New Republic.

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Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who chairs the Finance Committee’s health subpanel, told reporters Tuesday that there’s “no way, in its present form, that I will vote for” the Baucus proposal. He cited the likely absence of a public option as the central reason for his opposition.

“If it stays the way it is now, or even close to it, I’m going to vote no,” Rockefeller said, vowing to offer “many, many, many” amendments to the legislation — including a public option provision — when the bill is marked up in the Finance Committee.

The statement is a bit premature. Baucus remains in negotiations with the Gang of Six — a bipartisan group of Finance members — and his final proposal isn’t expected to be unveiled until Wednesday.

Still, Baucus provided a pretty good look at what the bill will contain when he released a draft summary last week. That blueprint excludes the public option in favor of private health insurance cooperatives, championed by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). Rockefeller, however, called the co-ops “an absolutely ridiculous idea.”

It’s unclear how many other Democrats feel as strongly about the public option as Rockefeller does. The West Virginia Democrat said that, while a number of Senate Democrats want to see the public option become a part of the final bill, he’s not aware of any others who have said they would vote against the Baucus proposal as it stands.

“I know one who did,” he said. “That’s me.”

Or so says Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a member of the Finance panel who told MSNBC today that he “can’t support what Sen. Baucus is arguing for, and I’m not sure any Republicans can.”

Hatch said “there’s no question” that the bill that emerges will be a partisan proposal, adding that he “really sincerely doubt[s]” that it would win the votes of even the moderate Maine Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

So much for the art of compromise from the world’s greatest deliberative body.

h/t: The Hill

For one thing, The Times indicates, the co-op would also need government backing in order to launch:

The government would offer start-up money, perhaps $6 billion, in loans and grants to help doctors, hospitals, businesses and other groups form nonprofit cooperative networks to provide health care and coverage.

Second, it takes a long while for co-ops to establish themselves as viable competitors to for-profit insurers:

Larry J. Zanoni, executive director of the Wisconsin plan, said: “We are a testament to the success of a health care cooperative. But it took us over 30 years to get where we are today.”

And finally, The Times reports that the co-op model hasn’t helped North Dakota, where a  co-op-style non-profit has monopolized the insurance market rather than promoting competition.

Mr. Conrad’s own state demonstrates the uncertainties surrounding cooperatives. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota dominates the state’s private insurance market, collecting nearly 90 percent of premiums. As a nonprofit owned by its members, the company would hope to qualify as a co-op under federal legislation, said Paul von Ebers, its incoming president and chief executive. [...]

Any new insurer in North Dakota would probably try to take members from the local Blue Cross plan, but that would not be easy to do.

Representative Earl Pomeroy, Democrat of North Dakota, said the proposal for cooperatives was “a very worthy idea.”

“The market here is uncompetitive,” said Mr. Pomeroy, a former state insurance commissioner. “A cooperative could provide an alternative source of insurance and some interesting competition for premium dollars. A co-op could operate at lower costs, in part because it would not need to pay its executives so generously as the local Blue Cross Blue Shield plan.”

Good luck.

With the arrival earlier this week of the Congressional Budget Office’s grim analysis of Kennedy’s bill, Democratic leaders are scrambling to tweak (overhaul?) their bills to get more folks covered and cut costs.

Indeed, Baucus’ Finance Committee, which had scheduled a markup on its version of the bill today, has postponed even the unveiling of the bill indefinitely. Roll Call (subscription) is reporting that the markup has been pushed until after the Fourth of July recess, which ends July 6.

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s health committee, led for the moment by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), is a few steps ahead, having begun the markup of its reform bill this morning. Still, there seems no end to the process. One analyst reports that more than 460 amendments have been submitted by committee members alone.