http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/06/winning-future.htmlNoting the dismal jobs picture that just came out - a 54,000 net jobs gain in May when we need at least five times that each month just to keep the hole from getting deeper - Robert Kuttner at American Prospect sounds the alarm and offers a strategy. According to Kuttner, with the economy still sputtering and no end in sight, a massive infrastructure investment program is the surest path out of the Great Recession:
(W)hat the economy needs to fully recover is a massive -- and I mean massive -- infrastructure and jobs program financed by surtaxes on wealthy individuals and on windfall financial-sector profits, including taxes on profits from short-term financial trades. We could also get upwards of $200 billion a year from tax enforcement, mainly on trans-national evasion used by America's wealthiest. Some of the funds for this program could also come from winding down the gratuitous wars we're currently engaged in. And some could even come from a modest increase in short-term deficits.
The order of magnitude of the public investment program should be at least half a trillion dollars a year, for at least five years, and more if that doesn't solve the problem. We would not hesitate to spend this kind of money and levy surtaxes if America found itself in a serious war. It was the economic side-effects of the massive WWII program of tax, borrow, and invest that finally pulled America out of the Great Depression -- and powered the postwar boom.
But what we're getting from Washington - driven by phony GOP hysterics over budget shortfalls they largely created with a doctrine of "Tax Cuts Uber Alles" - is not a focus on growth via public investment funded by taxing runaway wealth accumulating at the top, but an agenda of spending cuts - supposedly to "lower deficits." (Curiously this concern with deficits is quite new among Republicans, who came into office in 2000 attacking the surplus and Dick Cheney famously claiming "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter.")
More at the link --
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