'Bipartisan' jobs bill: Two little, two late?

TO A CHORUS of Tweeted hosannas, 70 U.S. senators - including eight Republicans - voted to pass something called a "jobs bill" on Wednesday.

Bipartisanship at last!

The bill, which the House of Representatives will vote on soon, calls for spending a total of $35 billion, some of it to reauthorize federal funds for highway and transit projects and some on tax breaks for businesses to write off equipment. About $13 billion would go to tax cuts for employers who hire new workers, although some experts say that much of the money would go to companies that would have hired the workers anyway.

The bill is expected to create 250,000 jobs from April to the end of the year, which is not nothing - especially if you happen to be a person who gets one of them. But the U.S. economy has to add 400,000 jobs a month for three years to get back to where it was before the recession. Right now, 15 million Americans are unemployed - 40 percent of them for more than six months.

So the long twilight struggle that was required to pass this a-drop-in-the-bucket bill has to leave in despair those who care about the short- and long-term effects of massive unemployment.

Some things to consider:

The bill was allowed to come to a vote Wednesday only because five Republicans joined with all but one Democrat on Monday to break yet another Republican filibuster. (Among them: the recently elected Massachusetts senator and "tea party" darling Scott Brown - who faced immediate abuse from right-wing commentators.)

Six Republican senators then turned around to vote for the bill that, the day before, they had voted to block. This hypocrisy is no match for the multitude of Republicans who voted against last year's stimulus bill and who then bragged about the jobs it created in their states. But it highlights just how dysfunctional the Senate has become.

It was downright pathetic to see how pleased the Democratic leadership was at this teeny, tiny victory. Some even proclaimed that they had hit upon a strategy to coax a few Republicans to maybe not block their efforts to help the millions of Americans who are hurting.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised to follow up Wednesday's victory with several relatively modest bills that together could be called a "jobs agenda" - including extension of unemployment benefits and federal funding to support the tourism industry.

But even if this piecemeal approach were to be completely successful, the Senate likely would authorize about $80 billion on job creation. This is just about half of the modest $154 billion jobs-creation bill passed by the House last year, and that in turn fell far short of the $250 billion that President Obama proposed in his budget. And that is far less than what many experts say is needed to get the nation's job-creation engine going.

Employers are not going to hire new workers unless they can be reasonably sure that there are customers out there with the money to buy what employers are selling. And that means more help from the federal government to shore up state and local governments so they don't have to cut services, substantial investments in infrastructure and - yes - public-service jobs.

So, as Congress pursues the chimera of bipartisanship, it almost ensures that whatever jobs are created will be too few and too late to save people who are in danger of losing their homes, their health and their hope.

But hey, incumbents running for re-election can now run ads touting their vote for a "bipartisan jobs bill." *