Monday, August 08, 2011

Oh Right, Jobs!

Washington still isn't talking about jobs, but Jared Bernstein is, FAST!…and the Debt Ray from Outer Space.

"While all this debt ceiling junk was going on, Mary Filardo, Ross Eisenbrey, and I were developing the FAST! idea—Fix America’s Schools Today.

As OTEers know, this is a national infrastructure program to repair, retrofit, insulate and “green-up” the nation’s stock of public schools.  Importantly, it’s structured to be labor-intensive (as opposed to capital-intensive–this is key in today’s infrastructure efforts), ready-to-go, based on existing formulas and practices re distribution of the resources, and highly visible in communities across the country.

It’s also scalable.  We could fix some schools and get a bunch of folks facing very high unemployment rates back to work with a $20 billion investment.  But the extent of the backlog could easily absorb hundreds of billions."

They even found $46 billion in funding by closing a fossil fuel industry loophole.

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