The Dow has recently hit above 10,000 points, and 79 metropolitan areas in the US are officially out of recession. However the unemployment rate is still officially 9.8%, and is realistically more like 16% if you include those who have given up looking for work, or are “underemployed” (working a part time job that does not sustain their family). It seems that though the bailout was capable of re-inflating Wall Street and Goldman-Sachs, everyone in Washington seems to be scratching their heads on how we can lower the unemployment rate. I’d like to submit my own suggestion for putting Americans to work, lets bring back the WPA and the CCC.

Despite what you might hear from Michael Steele, government has a very good record of creating public works jobs. Not only can public works projects give unemployed Americans temporary work, it can create new investments for America that hold real value. Not Wall Street making money with money value, or McDonalds “would you like fries with that” value, I mean real economic value. To paraphrase Adam Smith: when a stick is on the ground it has no value, but when you carve it into an axe handle your labour has given it value. New bridges, better roads, power lines, and high-speed rail…these are the sorts of projects that give jobs to Americans and invest in the public commons. It seems that when government gives truckloads of money to banks, the executives who sold all of us out get the dividends. But when government invests in the commons, everyone receives the dividends.

So if we want to see a real recovery for Americans, not a jobless one, we need let our unemployed citizens get back to work. This is a way to make them breadwinners again while also investing in the future of our country.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.