Yesterday, a coalition of progressive organizations--Demos, Economic Policy Institute, and The Century Foundation--released a fiscal blueprint for growing our way to economic stability. It is reinforced today by another report from some of the nation's leading progressive economists, the Citizens' Commission On Jobs, Deficits And America's Economic Future, including Jeff Madrick, a member of the commission and Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, with contributions from Roger Hickey, Robert Borosage and Richard Eskow of the Institute for America’s Future, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect and Demos, and Robert Pollin of the Political Economy Research Institute, with additional work by other members of the commission. From the executive summary of the report:

This commission has two major priorities. The first is to assure that the U.S. economy recovers fully and returns to a fast track of growth. This is the right way to reduce the current high deficit. The second is long-term public investment in sustainable growth, ensuring a healthy economy that can generate adequate revenue for needed public services. We have outlined three key principles that any plan for growth and deficit reduction must follow: Grow the economy. Don’t kill growth and jobs in the name of deficit reduction. Target what truly drives deficits. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Invest in future sustainable growth while balancing our national accounts. These are not just moral imperatives. They are economic prerequisites for successful deficit reduction.

Richard Eskow expands on that:

Jobs First Jobs will put money in the hands of people that will spend it, not those who would hoard it. That improves the economy for those around them, too, leading to still more jobs. We lost 8 million jobs in the recession, and we need 3.5 million just to cover new entrants into the workforce. We would need 300,000 new jobs each month, for years to come, just to get us back to where we were before Wall Street broke the economy, and we haven't been seeing anything close to that. The economy can't heal when 17 % its workforce, the consumers who are the engine of growth, is unemployed or underemployed. The cycle of unemployment needs to be replaced with a cycle of employment, and government needs to get the ball rolling. "Stimulus" is not a four-letter word Political spinmeisters have turned the word "stimulus" into an epithet. Whatever you call it, civil engineers say our nation's infrastructure ranks "C" or "D," which poses safety and quality-of-life problems. Much of the money in the Citizens' Commission report would go to rebuilding our infrastructure. Other funds would be used for green jobs that would put people to work and improve our economy, while helping us move to more reliable and environmentally safe sources of power while spending less on energy. $100 billion per year would help financially strapped states and prevent 500,000 workers from being laid off. That wouldn't just prevent more unemployment and economic pain. It would also prevent cutbacks in desperately needed services like law enforcement, firefighting, and education. Additional funding for local communities would provide even more jobs..... Conclusion: Cut deficits, not jobs The Bowles/Simpson and Rivlin/Domenici school of thought - a well-funded school supported by an interlocking cast of characters - wants to balance the budget before the economy is ready. Any deficit plan, even the Citizens' Commission plan, should be kept in check until employment returns to acceptable levels. Their arbitrary spending ceilings would prevent us from creating new jobs, and their proposed cuts would destroy current jobs. There's no need to impose a grim, spartan future of diminished expectations on a nation that can recover from its current wounds and emerge stronger than ever. We need patience, wisdom, and clear thinking, not a frenzy of budget-cutting that undermines the country's energy and purpose. What's more, a "deficit plan" isn't worth the name if it doesn't address the causes of the deficit. And an economic program that doesn't consider the entire economy is like a doctor that would kill the patient to cure the disease.

Too many Washington elites are invested in proving they are Very Serious People and have fallen for the clamor for austerity, a clamor reinforced by the traditional media in the vicious conventional wisdom cycle that's already proven disastrous to America (see: war, Iraq). We cannot slash and burn our way out of the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. The only way out of it is to grow our way out of it and finally into the 21st century.

That boils down to the three key focuses of this report: in the short term, a focus on jobs, jobs, jobs. It recommends spending $500 billion in each of the next two years in job investment and growth, with a spending focus on vital services at the state and local levels and infrastructure. In the medium term, they recommend expanding investments in sustainable growth, in education and training, green energy technologies and a 21st century infrastructure in transit and energy, paid for with cuts where there really is bloat in the federal budget--military, farm subsidies. In the long term, target what really drives the deficit--healthcare costs. That means reining in prescription drug costs and expanding Medicare with a public option.

What's not included, because it has nothing to do with the deficit and isn't a drain on America's finances: cuts to Social Security. In true shock doctrine fashion, the well-heeled Pete Peterson and other foes of Social Security are using this economic crisis to make it a Social Security crisis. If you haven't called your Senators yet to tell them to protect Social Security, please do.