December 28, 2008 9:50 A.M.
I like the idea of investing federal money in infrastructure and technology as an aspect of economic recovery. I don’t, however, see replacing bridges, roads and water mains as the complete solution just like I don’t see electric or hydrogen cars as a salve for what ails the auto industry.
Unless we become a nation that actually makes things again, all the roads and bridges will be nothing more than bridges to nowhere. Infrastructure jobs will stimulate the economy, certainly, but what we need is a roadmap, a plan for the economic future of our country. Certainly, the short term advantages of infrastructure investment are beneficial, but it’s what we do next that is critical. I don’t know how many more chances we will get to do this right.
About thirty years ago I started talking about changes I was noticing in the way our economy worked. It started with shifts in manufacturing toward automation and outsourcing. Coincident with this shift away from skilled American labor to imports and robots (most of which were imported) was a more fundamental shift away from an industrial, manufacturing-based economy to a “service”-based economy. The question I asked even then was, if we are eliminating our industrial economy, if we are no longer manufacturing or producing products here, who is the service economy going to serve?
The answer, of course, is only itself. That’s all our economy does now and it needs to change if this country is going to survive, compete and provide its citizens with any hope of a decent standard of living going forward.
Of course, we also need to change our expectations and, dare I say, examine our values for this to happen. I was impressed to hear the UAW President talk about stakeholder talks to address the problems which our auto industry is experiencing. I was not so impressed with the political response from politicians too indebted to BMW and Toyota to even listen to GM, Ford and Chrysler.
We need a plan here, folks, and we need it fast.
As with any plan, we need to assess where our economy is now and where it is going in the future. We need to determine how we can make a global economy work for us, and how we can re-tool our own national economic structure so that we remain relevant and not dependant on cheap commercial, industrial and consumer products shipped here from China.
My own bias is toward rolling our sleeves up and starting to make things here, to revive the value of hard work as a virtue and to make quick fix bubble economies a thing of the past. As soon as people started to get impatient and looking for fast track to owning all the toys our 52” flat screen TVs tell us we need. We lost sight of the virtue of hard work and patience. In addition to our work on roads, bridges, sewers and power grids we need to re-invigorate our railroads so that we can drive less and to ship all that stuff we are going to need to start making again.
You know that the economy is out of whack when a baseball player makes $180 million for a 9 year contract and all congress can do is blame an autoworker making $70 grand a year for the collapse of American industry. Of course, the auto execs who drove those companies into the ground need their exorbitant salaries to be able to afford to take their kids to a ball game because of the cost of tickets.
During the presidential debates the candidates were asked what they each thought Americans would have to sacrifice in the future to turn the economy around. None of them wanted to answer the question and that says something. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We need to be told how we can help, and if there is anything left of the fabric that was this country’s value system. What we need from government is a jump start (more like a defibrillator), and a clear direction. The rest is about character, patience, sacrifice and persistence. It’s time to take these “values” off the shelf, and off our sleeves, and to put them into practice.
