Bob Herbert of the New York Times on 1/10/09:
“ “The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000. At no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women fallen so much from its peak.”
This is an emergency. There is one overriding mission for the incoming Obama administration when it comes to dealing with the economy, and that’s putting Americans back to work. Forget the G.O.P.’s mania for tax cuts. Forget, for the time being (but not forever), the ballooning budget deficits. Forget the feel-good but doomed-to-fail effort to play nice-nice with the rabid partisans of the right who were the ones most responsible for ruining the economy in the first place.
Put the people back to work!
To do that, Democrats will have to overcome their natural timidity. They will have to fend off the Republican opposition in Congress and set in motion an enormous surge of public spending aimed at creating jobs, jobs, jobs.
The economy will not be saved by putting a pitiful $500 into the hands of the average taxpayer. And it won’t be saved by gift-wrapped concessions to the G.O.P. in the form of business tax cuts that the president-elect is said to be considering.
And the way to create jobs is through infrastructure investments (building and repairing roads, bridges, tunnels and water and sewer systems); and by investing in 21st-century clean energy initiatives, in public transportation systems, and in school construction; and by providing access to health care for the millions who don’t have it.
In other words, by investing in the people and the enormous productive capacity of the United States.
Referring to Mr. Obama’s national economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, Mr. Harkin added: “I am a little concerned by the way that Mr. Summers and others are going at this in that, to me, it still looks like a little more of this trickle down. If we just put it in at the top, it’s going to trickle down.”
Been there. Done that. Didn’t work.
The madness of trickle down and its corollaries ruined the economy and millions of Americans with it. President-elect Obama ran to the mantra of change. One hopes he is not too timid to deliver. “
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/opinion/10herbert.htmlKick and recommend.
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