Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is facing an uphill fight for re-election as he battles negative job approval ratings and a slow economic recovery. The state’s unemployment rate has dropped to 7.9 percent, but the “number of people working in Pennsylvania tumbled by about 14,000 in March, following a drop of 6,000 in February.” Private employment has remained flat for 13 months, “growing by a mere 1,000 jobs” and landing the state “49th in the nation for job creation during March.”

During an appearance on a local radio show this week, Corbett sought to explain away Pennsylvania’s less than stellar performance, arguing that the state gained 111,000 private sector jobs since he took office and is “doing better than other states.” But then he grew defensive and complained that “a lot” of businesses are still having trouble filling their ranks because too many Pennsylvanians use illegal drugs:

CORBETT: The other area is, there are many employers that say we’re looking for people but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test, a lot of them. And that’s a concern for me because we’re having a serious problem with that.

Watch it:

A Quinnipiac University Polling Institute poll released on Monday found Corbett trailing potental Democratic opponents by at least nine points.

Earlier this month, a state senator introduced a bill requiring drug testing of all recipients and applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in Pennsylvania. The state is currently “conducing a pilot program in 19 counties of testing only those convicted of felony drug offenses.” Since January of 2012, just two people have failed.

This morning’s report that the U.S. economy grew 2.5 percent in 2013′s first quarter wasn’t horrible, although it was still disappointing. But there was an even more discouraging number Americans should also pay attention to: inflation was a mere 1.1 percent.

While many think low inflation is a good thing, Johns Hopkins economist Laurence Ball published a new paper that argues two percent inflation, which American policy is currently targeting, is too low and that we should be aiming for four percent.

The key factor here is the Federal Reserve’s control over interest rates, which is an important tool for guiding the economy. When the Fed wants to boost the economy out of a recession, it cuts interest rates. When it wants to rein in inflation, it raises them. And for the last two decades, it’s done very well at keeping inflation to a historically low two percent.

That’s doing more harm than good, according to Ball, because it prevents the Fed from fighting economic slumps. The Fed can’t cut interest rates below zero, so there’s a floor on how much help it can provide in a depression, called the “zero lower bound.” And if the Fed keeps inflation low over the long-term, that will leave it less room to cut rates when another recession hits. Ball found the zero lower bound held Fed policy far back from where it should’ve been after the 2008 crash. He also looked at seven other recessions since 1960; in three of them, if inflation had only been two percent, the Fed would’ve also hit the zero lower bound.

Ball calculated that if inflation had been 4 percent going into 2008, giving the Fed two extra percentage points to cut from interest rates, the resulting shot in the arm would’ve increased the size of the economy by 5.9 percent in 2013. More importantly, the unemployment rate would be five percent instead of 7.6 percent — meaning just over four million fewer Americans would be out of work.

Furthermore, history shows that four percent inflation isn’t particularly dangerous. After reviewing the literature on high inflation across countries, Ball concluded genuine economic damage didn’t happen until the rate hit 8 percent. The calamitous inflation Americans remember from the 1970s, for example, peaked at 12.5 and 15 percent. As Matt Yglesias once quipped, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” economic boom came with about four percent inflation.

With the nation’s unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, members of Congress are fond of saying that they are focused on nothing but jobs. And yet, when Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) scheduled a Joint Economic Committee hearing on one of the biggest jobs-related crises facing the United States, just four of the committee’s 20 members bothered to show up.

When Klobuchar’s hearing on long-term unemployment began at 10:30 Wednesday morning, she was the only member in attendance. She was later joined by three other members, though not a single one of the committee’s 10 Republican members managed to attend, as National Journal’s Niraj Chokshi reports:

The Joint Economic Commitee is one of a handful of committees whose members come from both parties and both houses of Congress. Klobuchar was eventually joined by three colleagues (in order of their appearance): Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Maryland Rep. John Delaney and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings. All four are Democrats.

As Chokshi noted, it’s not uncommon for lawmakers to be absent at the beginning of hearings, and there were 25 others going on simultaneously at the time. But perhaps the poor attendance at a hearing dealing with unemployment shouldn’t be a surprise, given the general lack of focus from members of Congress on unemployment since the end of the recession. Instead, Congress has focused on debt and deficits, cutting spending even when evidence shows that the opposite needs to be done to grow the economy and create jobs.

There are currently 4.7 million American workers who have been unemployed for at least six months, and the challenges they face are immense. Not only do they long-term unemployed face discriminatory hiring policies that make it nearly impossible for them to find work, they are also losing federal unemployment insurance thanks to state-level cuts and sequestration, which slashed 10 percent from federal benefits.

Unfortunately, even if they had attended, it’s unlikely members of Congress would have gotten the complete picture of unemployment they needed. All four of the panelists invited to speak were white men, the least likely to be affected by the long-term unemployment crisis. A report that accompanied the hearing, in fact, noted that even as long-term unemployment rates have fallen for blacks and Latinos, “progress has been slower than for other racial and ethnic groups.”

There was a period when the U.S. looked like it might avoid the mistakes of some of its European counterparts, who rushed to austerity and have found themselves saddled with stagnant growth. But the U.S. has gotten into the austerity game, most recently with the implementation of sequestration’s across-the-board spending cuts.

And just like its austere European neighbors, the U.K. in particular, it’s now getting a warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In its latest report, the biannual World Economic Outlook, the New York Times reports that the organization had some stern words for those who think cutting government spending in the middle of a sluggish recovery is a good idea:

The fund lowered its estimate of United States growth this year to 1.9 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from its January forecast. While Washington had avoided falling over the “fiscal cliff,” the I.M.F. said that the United States had proved too aggressive in carrying out budget cuts, given its still-sluggish rates of growth and high unemployment levels. It said it anticipated that the across-the-board $85 billion in budget cuts known as sequestration would push down growth levels this year and beyond.

“The growth figure for the United States for 2013 may not seem very high, and indeed it is insufficient to make a large dent in the still-high unemployment rate,” Olivier Blanchard, the fund’s chief economist, said in the report. “But it will be achieved in the face of a very strong, indeed overly strong, fiscal consolidation of about 1.8 percent of G.D.P. Underlying private demand is actually strong, spurred in part by the anticipation of low policy rates under the Federal Reserve’s ‘forward guidance’ and by pent-up demand for housing and durables.”

The fund also lowered its projection of global growth to about 3.3 percent this year, a 0.2 percentage point reduction. And it didn’t just dole out harsh words for the U.S.: It lowered its forecasts for U.K. growth by 0.3 percentage points for this year and next, citing slashed spending.

Sequestration is already hurting the U.S. economy, but it’s not the only austerity measure that’s causing pain. Government spending overall has been lower during Obama’s administration than any point since the Eisenhower era. This is at a time of miserably high unemployment and incredibly low interest rates on U.S. borrowing. The U.S. could instead be spending money to rebuild crumbling infrastructure and put people back to work.

Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) blasted President Obama’s budget proposal today in a Senate floor speech for including new revenue. His argument: the same one he used two decades ago in opposing President Clinton’s hugely successful deficit reduction proposal.

Coats falsely suggested that balanced approaches to budgeting that include new revenue never lead to growth or job creation, asking his colleagues:

Has anyone ever seen an increase in the economy through an increase in taxes? Would taking [more] money in of people’s paychecks, does this result in more consumer spending which helps our economy? Adding a new tax burden to the American economy – when has that ever created a job?

Watch it:

Twenty years ago, Coats opposed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, the Clinton Deficit Reduction Act, because it too included additional revenue from the richest Americans. His prognostication at that time was that it would “cost Hoosier jobs,” arguing that because of the tax provisions, “we are not going to see an increase in jobs; we are going to see a decrease.”

After the passage of 1993 bill, which Coats and every congressional Republican voted against, the economy blossomed and job creation skyrocketed. In all, more than 20 million jobs were created during the Clinton administration. The economy grew faster under the Clinton-era tax rates, in fact, that it did under the lower Bush rates, and higher tax rates have corresponded with more growth over the last 60 years.

Young Americans make up nearly half of America’s unemployed workforce, according to a study released Thursday, and the unemployment rate for Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 is a staggering 15.1 percent. But the bleak job prospects for young Americans isn’t just contributing to the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate. According to a study from the Center for American Progress, the long-term effects will hurt young Americans for years to come.

The negative effects of unemployment, in fact, will cost young Americans more than $20 billion over the next decade, CAP’s Sarah Ayres found:

Not only is unemployment bad for young people now, but the negative effects of being unemployed have also been shown to follow a person throughout his or her career. A young person who has been unemployed for six months can expect to earn about $22,000 less over the next 10 years than they could have expected to earn had they not experienced a lengthy period of unemployment. In April 2010 the number of people ages 20–24 who were unemployed for more than six months had reached an all-time high of 967,000 people. We estimate that these young Americans will lose a total of $21.4 billion in earnings over the next 10 years.

It isn’t just unemployment that is depressing wages for young workers, though. College graduates and young workers are increasingly being pushed in to low-wage jobs as better opportunities aren’t available to them because of a slacking job market. Low-wage jobs have made up a majority of the jobs added since the end of the recession, and there are now 13.4 million college graduates occupying them — a 19 percent increase since the start of the recession.

These losses also hurt the broader economy, as young Americans are less able to spend money. Reports have already shown that unemployment for young Americans is holding back the housing recovery and thus the overall economic recovery, and other reports paint an even worse picture. As Ayres noted, this unemployment will cost young Americans $1.6 trillion over their lifetimes, which will also reduce revenues for the federal government.

But even as youth unemployment remains in crisis, the government has cut more than $1 billion from youth job programs and continues to focus on reducing the deficit instead of policies that will create jobs and help young Americans — and the country as a whole — finally recover from the Great Recession.

President Obama will release a budget next week that replaces the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration with other spending cuts while also raising $580 billion in revenue and making cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The budget plan, as the Washington Post notes, is almost identical to the offer Obama made to congressional Republicans in an attempt to reach a “grand bargain” to offset sequestration at the beginning of March, and it is aimed at reaching a similar bargain in the near future.

“The president has made clear that he is willing to compromise and do tough things to reduce the deficit,” an administration official told the Post, “but only in the context of a package like this one that has balance and includes revenues from the wealthiest Americans and that is designed to promote economic growth.”

Under Obama, the U.S. has already cut $2.5 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. This plan would offset sequestration with roughly $1.8 trillion in other deficit reduction, including $580 billion in revenues, $400 billion from Medicare and other health programs, $130 billion from applying a new inflation measure (chained CPI) to Social Security, $200 billion from defense and domestic spending, and $200 billion from farm subsidies and retiree programs, the Post reported.

But while Obama remains committed to deficit reduction, there is little evidence that the U.S. needs to continue cutting spending, which has plateaued since he took office in 2009. As the following chart shows, government spending has typically driven economic recoveries, but spending cuts made over the past three years have held back America’s current recovery:

With borrowing costs at historic lows and unemployment remaining persistently high — the economy added just 88,000 jobs in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the government could be making stimulative investments into the economy to help boost the recovery. That’s the path Obama originally sought in 2009 with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and it worked: the stimulus turned around the economy and put the U.S. on a faster pace of recovery than Europe, which has consistently pushed to reduce deficits, has experienced.

Sequestration has already begun taking its toll on local economies, kicking children out of preschool programs, hurting schools, closing air traffic control towers, and leading to furloughs and job losses. But it is unclear how replacing it with a “grand bargain” that still cuts spending at a time when the country is experiencing a glut of long-term unemployment and tepid economic growth would make the situation much better, especially if the budget also includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare. There may be a consensus in Washington that cutting the deficit is the top priority, but evidence suggests that the U.S. may benefit more from the pursuit of policies like the American Jobs Act, the legislation Obama sought in 2011 that economists said would have boosted growth while creating more than a million jobs.

According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 88,000 jobs were created last month, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.6 percent largely because the participation rate dropped. Analysts had expected 190,000 jobs.

The private sector added 95,000 jobs, while the public sector contracted again, losing another 7,000 jobs.

The February job numbers were revised from 236,000 to 268,000, while January’s numbers were revised from 119,000 to 148,000.

The 5.6 million young adults who are willing and able to work but cannot find a job make up 45 percent of America’s unemployed workforce, while another 4.7 million are stuck in part-time jobs when they are seeking full-time employment, according to a new report from Demos. In total, the U.S. needs to add 4.1 million jobs for young workers — ages 18 to 34 — to return to pre-recession levels of employment.

While unemployment for ages 18-to-34 is high, it is especially high for workers on the bottom half of that range, as this chart from the Demos report shows:

Unemployment is also worse for minority youths — particularly blacks and Latinos — and for young people without a college education. While the unemployment rate is low for young workers with a college degree — 7.7 percent for ages 18-to-24 and 5.1 percent for ages 25-to-34 — it is 10 percent for workers with only a high school diploma and 16.5 percent for workers with less education than that.

Worse, young workers are increasingly employed in low-wage sectors. More than 40 percent of workers between ages 18 and 24 work in either retail or food services, both of which are among the lowest-paying sectors in the American economy. College graduates, as recent Labor Department data showed, are increasingly working in low-wage jobs, largely because they have made up a majority of jobs added since the recession ended. One of every four Americans is projected to be working in a low-wage job in a decade.

For young workers, however, the effects can be worse both for them and the overall economy. Not only do low wages and unemployment hold young workers back economically for the rest of their lives, it also has hurt the housing market and the economic recovery. Still, lawmakers in Washington remain committed to focusing on deficit reduction the country doesn’t need instead of the jobs crisis that is hurting workers and putting a chill on both short- and long-term economic growth.