The author's solution is as follows:
"We must have programs that create some degree of confidence that America can be rebuilt, and jobs can be created, especially since consumer spending will likely decline as a part of GDP for many years. The unemployed have to be supported. But it would be better if the financial support employed labor in rational, long-term, major infrastructure projects, processed by a newly created National Infrastructure Bank.
These wouldn't be entitlement programs, but regeneration programs. Government spending on infrastructure projects-broadband Internet access across the nation, restoring decaying bridges and canals, building high-speed railways, modern airports, sewage plants, ports-has a high multiplier effect for adding jobs to the economy. And we will be fulfilling a desperate national need."
The thing is, even if the government would spend this money rationally instead of as political payoffs to favored constituencies, and even if the result would create some jobs, somewhere, to some degree, there's a real problem; that money's already been spent. We're way past spending what you and I will ever make the rest of our lives. At what point will the politicians admit "we're done, we don't have more to spend, we're admitting it, the spending is over, the money's gone"?? Will they ever? The greatest obligations the Treasury faces are to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. We've no where near enough to pay for those in their present form, and frankly there's no serious discussion about how to reduce what we've promised to an amount that we might be able to pay. Building bridges? I wish he was joking.
He continues: "A second avenue for increasing employment would be to enhance technology, the area of our greatest strength. We are depriving ourselves of productive talent by a fearful attitude toward immigration. We make it hard for bright people to come and we make it hard for them to stay, so once they have graduated from our universities they go home to work for our competitors. This is not the way to run a railroad."
The shocker here is that we're still even talking about this one. Hell, we should pay these people to stay here, at least then we'll have their brains at work to pay for some of the stupid spending we see our Government engaged in.
