This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project. I am a Fellow with CAF.
Dot: No net job gains since 2000. 8 million jobs lost in the recession. Never mind jobs for the 86,000 new people entering the labor force every month...
Dot: According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
"congested highways, overflowing sewers, and corroding bridges" were creating a "looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation's prosperity and our quality of life."
Dot: From a recent NY Times story on our country's water systems,
Today, a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.. . . State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
[. . .] "There's a lot of evidence that people are getting sick," he added. "But because everything is out of sight, no one really understands how bad things have become."
Connect the dots.
Ten million jobs needed. Ten million jobs that need doing.
It's called the infrastructure deficit. Right around 1981 we stopped improving the country's infrastructure and even started to defer maintaining it. We started "living off the seed corn." Now it is all catching up to us.
I'll be writing about infrastructure. Boring. Until it isn't.
Workers were repairing corroded joints on Minnesota's busiest bridge when it collapsed into the Mississippi River yesterday, killing at least four people and leaving more than 20 missing, state officials said.... As many as 50 cars plunged into the river along with the six-story structure, authorities and eyewitnesses said.
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Imagine giving 100,000 visas to foreign physicians. That's half-a-million jobs. And 100,000 new home-owners needing cars, furniture, refrigerators, washing machines, computers etc. What could be a better stimulus to our economy? This stimulus would be achieved without a taxpayer dime.
Plus, high-income earners with mid-income employees contribute tax dollars to the treasury. These jobs are long-term, cannot be exported and provides needed services to Americans. These jobs would be distributed throughout the country in big cities, small towns and rural America. Properly designed, the jobs would be produced about six months after the government issues the work visas / green cards and physicians arrive in the USA.
It would be nice to have US trained-graduates. Yet that will take 10 years for them to enter into the medical field. That's too long wait-time for patients or job-seekers. Recent report claims American doctors are reluctant to serve long-hours in rural areas and inner cities.
Guarantee that all who use the system have to pay for it, (the mandate) and that the "providers" get a 20% profit margin, (the payout ratio) and unemployment will magically disappear almost overnight.
Maintenance isn't sexy, politicians get to have press conferences for new buildings, highways, bridges, they supported, there's the obligatory "ribbon cutting ceremony", but no one ever talks about the money needed to maintain them. Nearly 30% of bridges in the U.S. are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete according to US DOT records. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.
When disaster strikes, there will be a hue and cry in the media, and two months later it will all be forgotten. Happens every year, and nothing changes.
Clinton and Newt were able to do that. Also note that infrastucture spending is mostly done by state and local government, not the federal govt and certainly not the President (congress contols appropriations).
and 70s because So much infrastucture was built for the first time. Spending went down on a percentage basis in the 80s and 90s because so much was already built. Spending then went way up this decade, a lot probably due to massive housing boom and the infrastucture required with it . Right now infrastucture is very good in some parts of the country (Southeast, southwest) but in poor shape in others (MI OH).
I am not sure what happened but it sure is coincidental that about the time we deregulated almost all industries maintenance became prohibitively expensive.
And as far as a building boom, we have been having a building boom in this country for the last 150 years. It just now takes scores less people to do the actual work.
Oh, right. They would be Evil Public Works Projects. And we can't have them, even if they would literally rebuild the country, re-employ tradespeople, and set money circulating again, because the Banks wouldn't make enough money from it and the GOP gets the vapors from systemic improvements.
Hold taxes & spending down to maintain economic growth. (Jan 1985)
Supply-side economics gets govt out of the way of growth. (Jul 1987)
U.S. economy does not need master planners, just freedom. (Dec 2000)
yes it took 30 years for these ideas to come to full fruit.