I should start by saying that i am not an economist. My brother is an economist, from the chicago school, both figuratively and literally, but I haven't asked him what he'd suggest.
Maybe the short term is a lost cause. What we're dealing with right now is perhaps the comeuppance from how we got out of the previous recession. Which may have been the comeuppance from how we dealt with the recession before that one, and so on.
Maybe thinking about the short term is the problem.
As i say in all of these threads, I would start by cutting the "defense" budget by two foreign wars.
I would then focus on the long term.
For starters we should regulate the bejezus out of investment banks. Up to and potentially including constitutional amendments mandating personal responsibility in financial instruments.
I would look for ways to remedy systemic (not specific, but systemic) waste in government spending. Inefficiencies, corruption, collusion, duplicated effort, etc.
I would use savings from that to fund public works programs. Said public works programs would have to hire 80% of their workers from the pool of people who have been laid off and have been unable to find work in their specific field. These would not be excellent, high-paying jobs, but would pay the same as unemployment + basic health benefits, including benefits for children. I would have this hiring policy because the economy benefits the most from people working at their earning potential. If you have a potential to earn $100,000 a year in your industry, the nation needs you to go do that, and pay taxes, and consume goods and services, and put some aside for savings as well.
Since these will be crappy jobs, there will be a lot of them, and i don't care if they are repainting fire hydrants or auditing the stacks at the public library so long as they are doing something for the public good. People should be encouraged to use these jobs as a bridge, and to get the heck out into their own industry ASAP.
Unemployed people with valuable industry experience should be employed as teachers for their specific fields of knowledge. They will be crappy teachers so we will need two to four per classroom, and the ones who turn out to be good teachers will be promoted to a position where they develop coursework for the crappy ones. Classes will be free for people on unemployment or working in the public works. In general, I believe that this should ultimately evolve into a massive and respectable vocational training system.
We should have a massive grant program for public primary education. Educators should be required to submit a plan and request funding. If the plan is good they get the funding. There should be an emphasis on math and science in these grants. Plans should be published openly, and any school should be able to pick one, say "Us too", and then only have to prove that they have the talent to execute it. Failure to provide results after the end of 1 year means that your school has to come up with a better plan. I don't care if the plan is literally "we have five bright students and we want to turn them into engineers" if you have a way to do it, and it works.
The federal government should pay bounties to schools that produce outstanding scholars, and the bounties should be weighed inversely to how well funded the school already is. A poor school should get at least 5x what a rich one does. These students will probably have no problem landing a scholarship if they have appropriate assistance in acquiring one.
We should double the amount of money we spend on primary scientific research. Admittedly I'm biased here because my dear departed uncle helped make a substantial chunk of modern technology possible in his days at Fermilab and Argonne.
Basically, I'm arguing that we should see if we can scrape by for now, while investing in the future.
It's easy for me to say, because i'm not only employed, but employed in a job where i help prevent government waste.
02 Sep 2011, 7:36 pm
