If there is another stimulus package..I hope republicans don't touch it.
It should go to infrastructure repair, upgrading the energy sector and building high speed rail. Not tax cuts.
That is the only way to directly create jobs and put money into the economy. And the taxpayers actually get something out of the borrowed money. Tax cuts and direct stimulus payments don't help much. We saw it under Bush with his $600 or whatever amount it was direct stimulus, and we saw it with the last stimulus. While I agree that it did save some jobs, I'm not sure it was 2 to 3 million as some like to state. The biggest problem with it is that the money didn't create any real growth.
There is a way to create jobs, simulate the economy and have a lasting benefit to our country.
It starts with everyone pulling together to achieve that end. That of course is the hardest part.
It begins by planning, setting in motion a belief once held that our country can do anything it sets its collective mind to do.
The most recent example was when JFK set the goal to put a man on the moon:
" We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
We need to cut where we can and where we do not exacerbate our unemployment problems; we need to get the private sector to hire and train the unemployed and those graduates who are seeking their first jobs. And we need to do so by the hundreds of thousands, not a few here and a few there.
There are two ways, or rather two venues where this can be planned. Home or away. Away generally requires war, home does not. WW II solved many economic problems, and few opposed our expenses after December 7, 1941. But the costs in blood were great, even today those lost in the war are still remembered and still grieved by surviving spouses and siblings and children and veterans.
The plan should benefit the many alive today and those yet to be born. It should make our country safer, more efficient and better able to respond to the many changes a global economy forces upon us. And it should ignite the American spirit.
It will not begin with naysayers or those too timid to take risks; it will not be born of lofty words and speeches or partisan propaganda, or by ideology or talking heads on the TV or radio. It must come from the people demanding the plan, one devoid of graft and self interest, one where Country First is not a slogan but a mission statement and a vision.
