America –Land of the Shortsighted

The catastrophic job losses of this recession – the worst since the Great Depression just haven’t sunk into the public’s consciousness and one can’t help but wonder just what it’s going to take to wake this country up. Bob Herbert had a great Op-Ed column in the NYT yesterday regarding this and according to him 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.

More and more homeowners, who once had solid credit, are falling seriously behind on their mortgages, thus amplifying the foreclosure crisis.

The Center for Labor Market Studies has compiled data showing that the recession’s effects have been “disastrous beyond belief” for some groups, including young men, men without college degrees and black men. These job losses among young workers have ominous long-term implications for American families and the economy as a whole.
But there was a development in Congress last week that should have been seen as significant, but as usual, the media is still obsessed with Limbaugh, Cheney and swine flu. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, 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 – projects that are badly needed and would be a boon to employment.

We have become self-destructively shortsighted in recent decades and that has kept us from acknowledging the awful consequences of joblessness that has swept the nation since the beginning of the recession in December of 2007. This 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. We’ve been told over and over by many that the infrastructure in our country is seriously damaged, but it just doesn’t seem to be making enough of an impression for us to seriously look at making the changes we need.

And, as Herbert says, 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. Herbert quotes a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the US is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school.

We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. And it’s tragic!

We’ve already lost nearly 5.7 million jobs in this recession and those losses have been overwhelmingly concentrated among male workers, especially among men under 35.

Herbert says, and I couldn’t agree more, that If the US 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 our crumbling infrastructure is the place to start.