In This Issue

WHEN MAYOR GAVIN Newsom sits down this month to start work on his first city budget for real, he might want to take a second to read a piece that appeared on the New York Times op-ed page Jan. 12. The writer is a political science professor at Yale University named Jacob S. Hacker. His point is absolutely critical to understanding the state of the U.S. (and San Francisco) economy today.

What Hacker says is that the latest confusing news out of Washington, D.C., (the soaring growth in stocks and consumer confidence, matched with miserable employment figures) is just masking an essential point: the economy has become more "uncertain and anxiety-producing" for most people. "By fixating on the day-to-day ups and downs, analysts have largely ignored the more telling trend: An increasing shift of economic risk from government and corporations onto workers and their families."

The U.S. economy, he notes, "is in the throes of a great transformation – from an all-in-the-same-boat world of shared risk toward a go-it-alone world of personal responsibility."

The "new democrats" love this personal responsibility thing almost as much as the Bush conservatives do, and there's a good reason for that: the people at the top of the economic pyramid, who fund the likes of Newsom and Arnold Schwarzenegger (and funded Gray Davis and Bill Clinton too) want the lower taxes that come from dismantling social programs, and they don't need government help to deal with the economic anxiety of layoffs, plant closures, jobs shifting overseas, and the shredding of the social safety net.

What Hacker didn't say is that, at a time when the federal and state governments are slashing spending, cities are becoming the service providers of last resort. They're also becoming the public sector employment providers of last resort. And let's remember, public sector employment is a good thing, a boon to the economy. Government jobs tend to be good, stable, unionized positions that pay living wages and benefits.

The city of San Francisco is the biggest employer in town. If the choice is to raise taxes on big business to save city jobs and local benefits, it ought to be a no-brainer: big businesses are increasingly screwing their employees, creating economic instability. Jacking up their taxes a little bit won't cost anywhere near the number of good jobs or do the sort of economic and social damage that cutting government would.