Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.
During all the talk about the debt limit and the "Super Congress" one thing kept getting lost in the mix. American politicians did not need to create a crisis to show their own greed and idiocy. There was already a crisis in America for a long time now. It is a jobs crisis and it has yet to be adressed.
And while millionaire politicians in both parties could care less about the jobs crises because quite frankly their sorry asses are covered and they are too busy watching out for the interests of millionaires, billionaires and Benedict Arnold corporations some folks are actually trying to find real solutions to put America back to work.
One such solution would not only put parents back to work but would benefit their children also. It is called FAST! and is explained here by Economic Policy Institute:
A national infrastructure project designed to improve public schools and facilities would benefit students and teachers and put hundreds of thousands of people back to work. In a new proposal released today, Mary Filardo of the 21st Century School Fund, Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute propose the enactment of a new program, Fix America’s Schools Today, or FAST!, designed to fund the maintenance and repair of public schools in the United States.
The current backlogs of school maintenance and repair projects are worth between $270 billion and $500 billion—at a time when state and local governments and school districts are facing unprecedented budget crunches. At the same time, the U.S. is facing an unemployment crisis; within the construction industry alone, 1.5 million workers are unemployed. Maintenance and repair of school buildings and facilities would provide students with an educational environment both safer and more conducive to learning and enable school districts to attract and retain quality teachers while simultaneously enabling hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers to find good-quality jobs in their communities.
“A program devoted to maintaining and improving public schools would provide students with healthy, safe, modern and environmentally-sustainable educational facilities, and it would lower school districts’ operating costs,” said Filardo. “The federal government has a major opportunity right now to both cut down on the backlog of infrastructure projects and reduce unemployment nationwide.”
http://www.epi.org/...
And before the powers that be in Washington try to say that we cannot invest in our own workforce and children the fact of the matter is that this program could easily comply with PAYGO rules:
To comply with PAYGO, we recommend that FAST! be paid for by eliminating fossil fuel preferences as in President Obama’s FY2012 budget. Closing these loopholes raises $46 billion over 10 years.
Read the whole plan here:
http://web.epi-data.org/...
So the question we should pose to politicians in both parties is this. Do we love our country enough to put our fellow citizens at work to benefit our own children?? Or will Washington politicians in both parties continue doing what they do best?? Padding their own pockets by enabling the greediest and least patriotic among us to continue hording the money at the cost of everyone else.
This is not only a battle to do what is right for our country as a whole, but a battle for the very soul of our nation and a fight to uphold the values America was founded upon. This is a fight we simply must win.