What Kind of Stimulus Package?
The elections are over. We can all get back to work. The current state of the economy is about two swirls short of a flush. The U.S. lost 240,000 jobs in October alone. The official unemployment rate is 6.5%. The real unemployment rate is estimated around 11%.
Washington is telling us we need another stimulus package. Personally, I have reservations. Since the campaigning is done, we should drop all the feel good give-aways that politicians used while pandering to an undereducated electorate and consider what the country really needs to regain it economic competitiveness. Just handing out more cash so consumers can buy more imported plasma TVs will stimulate some one’s economy, just not ours. Borrowing billions of dollars to buy non-essential stuff to fill our unpaid for houses is just racking up more national credit card debt. If we are going to go further into hock to try to revive the economy, we need to spend the money on something with lasting value.
I recently spent two weeks in Shanghai, China.
The most obvious difference I saw between Shanghai and most American cities was infrastructure. Shanghai has excellent roads, bridges, subways, trains, buses, power, communications, parks – everything I can think of. They may not have an American style democracy but, the people in power are spending the country’s money, and they have plenty of it, wisely.
If the U.S. is going to try to spend its way out of this recession, and I am not recommending we do, we should at least invest the money in things we need for our long-term viability. We have thousands of bridges with deferred maintenance. We have lousy public transportation. Our electrical grid is antiquated and not ready to support the kind of distributed power generation we need to build. If we are going to take out another mortgage, lets spend the money fixing these things that provide a long term return.
Our education and health care systems are also substandard and in need of overhaul. These however, are more complex issues that we cannot just throw money at. They will require more thought, debate, and time before we can decide how to repair them.