A weak economy staggers along - but is anyone in Washington paying attention?

As the recovery falters and appalling unemployment numbers remain with us, politicians of both parties seem to be focused on some version of debate over the deficit and the long-term future of Medicare.  Defense of Medicare against nutty professor proposals to end it is critical, but it doesn't speak to the crisis at hand.

This political logjam is an indication of just how lacking in seriousness and skewed to the socially nihilistic Right (personified by Ayn Rand fan Paul Ryan) our political discourse has become in a time of real crisis on the jobs front. No one in Washington seems to care about the central issue of getting economic growth on track and putting Americans back to work. David Leonhardt, business and economics writer for the New York Times, sounds the alarm:

The latest economic numbers have not been good. Jobless claims rose last week, the Labor Department said on Thursday…Perhaps the most worrisome number was the one Macroeconomic Advisers released on Wednesday. That firm tries to estimate the growth rate of the current quarter in real time, and it now says annualized second-quarter growth is running at only 2.8 percent, up from 1.8 percent in the first quarter. Not so long ago, the firm’s economists thought second-quarter growth would be almost 4 percent.

An economy that is growing this slowly will not add jobs quickly. For the next couple of months, employment growth could slow from about 230,000 recently to something like 150,000 jobs a month, only slightly faster than normal population growth. That is certainly not fast enough to make a big dent in the still huge number of unemployed people.

Are any policy makers paying attention?

When the economy weakened in the first quarter, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Obama administration officials said the slowdown was just a blip and growth would soon pick up. Today, many Wall Street economists are saying much the same thing: any day now, things will improve.

Maybe they will. But the history of financial crises shows that they produce weak, uneven recoveries, with unemployment remaining high for years. That history also shows that aggressive government action — the kind of action Washington took in 2008 and 2009, but not for most of 2010 — can make the situation much better than it otherwise would be.

The latest signs of weakness suggest that policy makers remain too sanguine. It is easy to see how the rest of 2011 could end up disappointing, much as 2010 did.

For one thing, there are specific forces holding back growth. Oil prices, though down in the last few weeks, are still 40 percent higher than a year ago and continue to siphon money away from the American economy to overseas economies...

The housing market also remains in terrible shape... State and local governments continue to cut jobs.

These specific problems worsen the broader insecurity of both households and business executives — insecurity that is typical in the wake of a financial crisis. Long after the crisis itself is over, businesses are slow to hire and quick to fire...

For households, already coping with miserly wage growth, that is another reason not to spend. The Commerce Department’s updated gross domestic product figures showed that consumer spending grew at an annual inflation-adjusted rate of only 2.2 percent in the first quarter, not the 2.7 percent rate the department initially reported...

The situation is now uncomfortably similar to last year’s, when the economy sped up in the first few months only to stall in the spring and summer.

The most sensible response for Washington would be to begin thinking more seriously about taking out an insurance policy on the recovery. The Fed could stop worrying so much about inflation, which remains historically low, and look at how else it might encourage spending. As Mr. Bernanke has said before, the Fed “retains considerable power” to lift growth.

The White House and Congress, meanwhile, could begin talking about extending last year’s temporary extension of business tax credits, household tax cuts and jobless benefits beyond Dec. 31. It would be easy enough to pair such an extension with longer-term deficit reduction.

Any temporary measures will eventually need to lapse, of course. But the current moment remains a textbook time to use them — when the economy is struggling to emerge from the aftermath of a terrible recession. The one thing not to do is to turn to deficit reduction too quickly after a crisis, as Europe is painfully learning.

Almost four years after the mortgage market first began to quiver and unemployment began to rise, Americans are understandably eager for good economic news. But wishing for it doesn’t make it so. You have to wonder whether the people in Washington have learned that lesson yet.