Enough of the silly slogan that "government isn't the solution, government is the problem." Government, in fact, is the solution to a national economic calamity not seen since the 1930s.
Today's painful conditions would have been more disastrous had Washington not stepped in with massive business bailouts. The remedy prescribed by ultraconservative Republicans—more tax cuts—would have healed nothing. In fact, tax cuts favoring the wealthy enacted during the George W. Bush years plus the voracious borrowing to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan wars accelerated today's misery.
Two broad, fast-acting prescriptions for recovery should be launched quickly.
First, President Obama should be authorized, if congressional approval is needed, to use $200 billion in leftover funds of the Troubled Asset Relief Program to save small, shaky banks and help small businesses.
Second, to complement the president's proposal for using TARP surpluses for jobs, Congress should start a national jobs program to hurriedly put as many of today's 16 million unemployed to work as possible without delay.
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Restoring work for millions will save homes from foreclosure, provide stable family incomes and, utterly vital to the national good, begin comprehensive restoration and repair of America's shamefully neglected infrastructure of schools, dams, bridges, waterworks and roads.
This would borrow an idea more than 70 years old from President Franklin Roosevelt's arsenal of 1930s Great Depression strategies.
In that era, when unemployment once shot as high as 25 percent in a U.S. population of 126 million (versus 10.4 percent today on a U.S. population of 305 million), FDR's two major works programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, eventually employed more than 6 million. Jobs programs created the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to name two major projects, plus thousands of parks, works of art and public buildings.
Consider, too, the jobs impacts of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's launch of construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and of the Comprehensive Employment Training Act in the 1970s.
Not only would an immediate national jobs program ease unemployment while repairing crucial public facilities, it would also generate ancillary jobs in tools and equipment manufacturing, push production of building materials and restore the flow of taxes. All would lead to a boost in consumer spending to help retailers of everything from baby clothes to cars.
To naysayers: This would be no more putting people on the "dole" than does paying Congress to debate and dither.
