By BOB HERBERT
Published: 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.
The Times ran a front-page story on Monday that said job losses are forcing ever larger numbers of homeowners who once had solid credit to fall seriously behind on their mortgages, thus amplifying the foreclosure crisis.
And now 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.
At the same time, there was a development in Congress last week that should have been seen as significant but could not elbow its way into the media precincts obsessed with Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and swine flu.
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.
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. It’s tragic.
Ms. DeLauro’s bill has an unusual range of support, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Service Employees International Union. One of her co- sponsors is Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who noted that his hometown, Minneapolis, is where the I-35W bridge collapsed in 2007, hurling cars, trucks and vans into the Mississippi River and killing 13 people.
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.
For those who are concerned about whether the government can afford these major projects, I would note that one of the biggest supporters of the creation of an infrastructure bank is Felix Rohatyn, the financier who guided New York City through the harrowing fiscal crisis of the 1970s. He is hardly a radical when it comes to government finances.
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.
The memo said: “Since unemployment cannot begin to fall until payroll growth hits about one percent — and payroll growth will not hit one percent until
growth hits at least 2.5 percent to 3 percent — we may not see any substantive payroll growth until late 2010 or 2011, and unemployment could rise until that time.”
We’ve already lost nearly 5.7 million jobs in this recession. Those losses, the center says, “have been overwhelmingly concentratedamong male workers, especially among men under 35.”
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?ref=opinion
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