More than three years have passed since the U.S. economy plummeted into the Bushes. We’ve seen massive bank bailouts and a bumper crop of tax incentives for businesses that might hire; and we’re told 3 million jobs have been generated since Obama took office. But so far, there’s been nothing but silence from our government about the jobs crisis in the nonprofit sector.
Much has been said and written to urge the Obama administration to launch a program supporting employment in the nonprofit sector. Public-service employment programs like the WPA and CETA offer models, however flawed, of how such programs can work. They can get more people to work faster than any other approach. So far, however, White House employment initiatives have focused exclusively on the for-profit part of the economy.
Mixed messages meanwhile confuse the picture of philanthropic giving to nonprofits. I tend to believe Giving USA’s recent revision of its own earlier, rosier estimates:
… donations fell by higher percentages in 2008 and 2009 than at any other time in the past five decades. … donations by individuals … fell by nearly 15 percent, adjusting for inflation, over 2008 and 2009. That information, based on data released by the Internal Revenue Service, was not available when researchers produced their findings last year.
Prospects for any immediate turn-around, as summarized in the same report, look bleak: “… the recession cloud may hover for years, and it could be as long as 2016 before donations return to levels raised before the economy soured.”
Not every individual donor has been equally affected. The rich have notoriously continued to get richer. This means they can continue to support the philanthropies they prefer, resulting in nonprofit-sector success stories that mirror growing inequality elsewhere in the economy. Here in Kansas City, for example, much attention has gone to last fall’s opening of the $414 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Not only is this venue necessarily unaffordable for most Kansas City residents, it has for years already sucked the air out of philanthropic support for other less prestigious cultural initiatives, much less the largely unaddressed needs for basic community development in sections of the city where poor people live and try to work.
An Economic Policy Institute Report asserts that using tax cuts to try creating jobs actually results in overall economic loss — with additional losses in our national quality of life. Instead it calls for direct investment in the public-service sector:
… raising taxes and using the additional revenues to pay for more public services enhances economic growth and expands employment.… By stimulating growth, generating jobs, and providing direct benefits to residents, improvements in state and local public services can be one of the most effective strategies to advance the quality of life of citizens.
Profit-obsessed pundits and critics alike frequently misquote Calvin Coolidge as having said, “The business of America is business. In fact he said something slightly different — “the chief business of the American people is business” — but in the same speech went on to moderate this simple slogan:
Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. … We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.
Why have our political leaders abandoned support for investment in public service? Millions of jobs need to be done for community development, broadly defined. Those employed would not only work to restore the quality of life in communities all over America: they would spend their paychecks directly in an economy that needs our confidence.
“The accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence.” Let’s put ourselves back to work for the public good.
