1 Boring Old Man

Our Crumbling Foundation
New York Times
By BOB HERBERT
May 25, 2009

I’m not sure that the catastrophic job losses of this recession, the worst since the Great Depression, have really sunk into the public’s consciousness. And that would mean that the ground has not been prepared for the kind of high-powered remedies needed to get the economy back into some kind of reasonable shape…

Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced a bill to establish a national infrastructure development bank that would use public and private capital to fund projects of regional and national significance. These are projects that are badly needed and would be a boon to employment. America has become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades. That has kept us from acknowledging the awful long-term consequences of the tidal wave of joblessness that has swept over the nation since the start of the recession in December 2007. And it is keeping us from understanding how important the maintenance and development of the infrastructure is to the nation’s long-term social and economic prospects.

It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts. It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school…

The infrastructure bank would be authorized to issue bonds, provide loans and offer loan guarantees to finance large-scale projects. The idea would be to leverage substantial amounts of private capital in support of such projects, and to make more prudent decisions about which projects move ahead…

The link between the need to rebuild the nation’s crumbing infrastructure and the crucial need to find rich new sources of employment in this economic downturn should be obvious, a no-brainer. The Center for Labor Market Studies is at Northeastern University in Boston. A memo that I received a few days ago from the center’s director, Andrew Sum, notes that “no immediate recovery of jobs” is anticipated, even if the recession officially ends, as some have projected, by next fall…

If the U.S. is to have any hope of getting its economic act together over the next few years, there will have to be a much greater focus on putting people back to work. Rebuilding the infrastructure is the place to start.