One year after facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, our nation is recovering. The economy that President Barack Obama inherited was shedding more than 700,000 jobs every month. We're now on pace to add 95,000 jobs a month this year. An economy that shrank 6 percent in the final months of the Bush administration grew 5 percent last quarter -- the strongest rebound in 30 years.

The problem is that this isn't nearly enough. At 17 percent, un- and underemployment is the highest since the 1930s. The average length of unemployment is more than six months, the longest on record.

This kind of joblessness doesn't just hurt families' bottom lines, it tears families apart. Long-term unemployment, especially among younger workers, has clear links to lower career earnings and limited advancement, as well as depression, drug abuse and other problems that linger long after the job market recovers.

Nobel economist Paul Krugman calls the current economic outlook, even with modest job growth, "a recipe for immense human suffering."

To return to healthy employment levels, we need 11 million new jobs by the end of next year -- nearly 600,000 jobs every month. That will require a major investment in job creation. However, for our recovery to be sustainable, we also have to face our other economic challenge: a soaring deficit and debt.

It's important to view the deficit in perspective.

When President Bill Clinton left office, the budget surplus was on pace to pay off the entire federal debt by 2012. That projected $800 billion surplus has turned into a $1.4 trillion hole. Over the next 10 years, almost half of the deficit will be interest payments on the huge amount of spending President George W. Bush dumped onto the national credit card, like massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent and the war in Iraq. President Obama's stimulus, which has helped rescue our economy, accounts for just 7 percent of our long-term fiscal gap.

Reducing the deficit and debt is a long-term challenge. Joblessness is an immediate crisis. If we confuse the two we run the risk of making both worse.

Without work, consumers will stop spending, businesses will downsize and the recovery will falter. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's, rates our chances at 1-in-4 of falling back into a more serious recession if we don't invest in job creation now.

In December, the House passed a jobs bill to compensate for the $100 billion stripped from the stimulus by a small group of senators, led by Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. Most economists agree that was a mistake that lengthened the recession and cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The Senate followed last week -- three months later -- by sending us back a severely weakened version that is about a tenth of the size and not nearly adequate.

It is possible to create jobs on the scale we need, but there's only one way to do it: a major investment in small businesses. It is small businesses and entrepreneurs, not Fortune 500 companies, that are the engine of growth -- they employ more than half of Pennsylvanians and create 70 percent of new jobs.

As vice chairman of the Small Business Committee, I have introduced legislation to provide a refundable tax credit to small businesses that create jobs, add hours or raise wages. This program alone has the potential to create 5 million new jobs -- recouping more than half the jobs lost in the recession. This step, along with a range of investments through the Small Business Administration, can go a long way to turning the end of the recession into a strong recovery.

To prevent further losses, we must provide direct aid to hard-hit state governments that face a record shortfall of $190 billion and are predicted to cut 700,000 jobs this year. To make sure the jobs we create stay in the United States, we need to close loopholes that allow corporations to avoid taxes by shipping American jobs overseas.

These measures come at a cost, but failing to do what is required would be far more expensive -- in taxpayer money, in the well-being of millions of families and in our nation's strength and standing in the world.

The investments we are making now are not sustainable, but they aren't meant to be. Once Americans are working again, we must make the tough decisions required to eliminate the deficit, including controlling entitlement spending. We also need to return to commonsense "pay-as-you-go" budgeting that produced record surpluses during the Clinton administration.

The first step to eliminating the deficit, however, is doing whatever it takes to put America back to work.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.