This blog is cross-posted at StewartAcuff.com
Last week the Association of General Contractors announced that the deep cuts in federal spending known as sequestration have stopped $4 billion dollars of infrastructure work.
The radical rightwing Republicans in Congress have celebrated the budget cuts and ignored the tens of thousands of job losses, especially amongst federal workers that sequestration has caused.
In an economy like ours, sequestration is like pouring gasoline on a fire about to consume your house.
Last week, President Obama announced his intentions to create $50 billion dollars of infrastructure projects for two reasons – both of which we’ve talked about in this space:
1) because the nation’s infrastructure is dangerously eroded, it is reducing productivity and costing businesses unnecessary delays on equipment
2) to put thousands of people back to work as quickly as possible.
NOW IS THE TIME TO GO BIG ON INFRASTRUCTURE!!!
Money is cheap. Investment is cheap. And good Lord do we need the jobs.
In fact, the Progressive Caucus in the Congress is absolutely right when they call for $495 billion dollars of investment on infrastructure.
America does not feel like the country of my youth, which for all its many problems built the entire interstate highway system, raced into outer space, and built thousands of units of federal housing.
Last week, a Nobel Prize winning economist said our lack of investment in our country and in our people is cheating our children and grandchildren both because people need work and because the structural foundation of our country needs to be fixed now.
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Stewart Acuff is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work.
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