Every day you can ingest a dozen or two stories about this or that statistic, this or that indicator about the current trajectory of the economy. You can bury yourself in past and current data and diverging interpretations of that data and emerge with a prediction about when things will get better for the nearly one in five Americans who is unemployed or underemployed.
For instance, there’s today’s tidbit, which indicates that hiring will remain flat through the end of the year, with 73% of surveyed companies saying they will either maintain existing payrolls or lay off staff. Unless you’re out queuing up to apply for a job with one of the companies that is hiring, you can spend every day, all day, following the ongoing guessing game for when things will return to the way they were. Just one problem with that. Things are not going to return to the way they were. This focus on minutiae ignores the big picture of structural change in the economy.
That big picture is what the savvy folks at the Campaign for America’s Future have paid attention to since the organization’s founding 12 years ago. It’s also what participants at the CAF-organized Making It in America: Building the New Economy will be probing when they meet next Thursday in D.C. The objective is to begin framing an agenda for a new and lasting economy. Not just how to put people back to work in any old job but how to create good new jobs, manufacturing jobs, the kind of high-paying jobs U.S.-based corporations and U.S. trade policies have increasingly shipped off shore for the past three decades, the kind of jobs that built the American middle class. With an essential new twist: these new jobs will be green.
Ensuring that "green jobs" doesn’t merely become another throwaway, feel-good buzzphrase, policy changes are needed to make them actually happen.
One of the speakers at the conference will be Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. His proposed Impact Act would put $30 billion into revolving loan funds for the small businesses who are having a devil of a time getting loans from the banks we bailed out. It’s estimated that the Impact Act would generate 2.5 million green jobs. That compares with the 2.1 million manufacturing jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007. If that many jobs can be generated with $30 billion, says Campaign for America’s Future staff member Mike Elk, think what could be done with the amount spent on the TARP bailout. "We wouldn't be talking about unemployment; we would be talking about companies having trouble finding enough workers."
But one or two solid pieces of legislation won’t do what is required. CAF co-founder Robert Borosage recently pointed out:
Fundamental changes are needed. Trickle down should be supplanted by public investment led growth – large scale public investments in areas vital to our future like infrastructure, research and development, education and training. These investments should be deficit funded until the economy actually starts putting people back to work, and then sustained and paid for through progressive tax reform. Tax speculative security transactions, generating $100 billion a year in revenue to invest in a 21st century infrastructure that would put people to work and make the economy more productive. Raise top end taxes, reduce inequality, and invest in making college affordable or exploring the green technologies of the future.
We've pursued tax cuts, promising private investments would flourish. But much of the productive investment and lavish consumption went abroad. In reality, public investment would be far more effective. We have a staggering public investment deficit that must be met for a world efficient economy. Public investment is more likely to be invested, more likely to be spent here, more likely to create good jobs here, and far more likely to generate new technologies and productive private investments.
We need to complement this with a bold manufacturing strategy to make certain that we help lead the inevitable green industrial revolution, so the new technologies will be created and made in America. Shed the notion that we'll benefit by exporting windmills and solar cells and electric cars subsidized by China so that they are cheaper to us. We can't exchange dependence on foreign oil with dependence on foreign made windmills. Make the public commitment to transition, and then use our purchasing power to invite the companies with the best technology to bid on contracts so long as they make it here in America. Not simply a timid buy America policy satisfied with the final assembly of parts and technologies made elsewhere, but moving entire supply chains so that our workers and engineers and entrepreneurs are familiar with cutting edge technologies that our inventors can soon surpass.
You can read other commentaries about what is needed here.
Admission is free, but you must register and RSVP in advance for the luncheon, where space is limited.
Besides Sen. Brown, other speakers scheduled to appear at the conference are: Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell; Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO; Kate Gordon, Apollo Alliance; Rep. Rosa DeLauro; Sen. Jim Webb; Dr. Maya Rockeymoore, Global Policy Solutions (GPS); Leo W. Gerard, President, United Steel Workers; Professor Susan Schurman, Rutgers University; Jeff Madrick, The New School; Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect; Harold Meyerson, The Washington Post; Rep. James E. Clyburn; Prof. Suzanne Berger, MIT Int’l Science and Technology Initiatives.