Clear Message From July Jobs Report: Let's Repair Our Infrastructure

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-johnson/57314/clear-message-from-july-jobs-report-lets-repair-our-infrastructure

Clear Message From July Jobs Report: Let's Repair Our Infrastructure
by Dave Johnson | August 2, 2014 - 8:10am

The Labor Department reported today that 28,000 manufacturing jobs were added in July. The report added, “Job gains occurred in motor vehicles and parts (+15,000) and in furniture and related products (+3,000). Over the prior 12 months, manufacturing had added an average of 12,000 jobs per month, primarily in durable goods industries.”

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) updated their meter of manufacturing jobs, called the #AAMeter. This meter tracks the progress of President Obama’s promise to create 1 million new manufacturing jobs in his second term. July’s report puts the #AAMeter at +195,000 jobs. This is on pace to meet his goal, but the meter has rarely met the goal before this.

~snip~

A really great way to bring tons of manufacturing and other jobs to the economy would be to just fix our infrastructure. We have to do this anyway, and it gets more expensive every day we wait to get started. This has been “deferred” since the Reagan tax cuts. As a result, we have bridges actually falling down and killing people. We have roads that are so bad that they are causing crashes and damaging vehicles. Our water systems are breaking down — just this week 20 million gallons of water flooded the UCLA campus after a water-main break. 20 million gallons lost in the middle of a drought! Our 1930s power grid is unreliable and wasteful. Don’t even mention our 1950s rail system.

If we could just invest in the infrastructure we already have it would provide millions of jobs. There are the direct jobs working on the infrastructure. There are the jobs in the Buy America supply chain. There are the jobs of all the businesses that support all of those jobs and people.

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Here's a novel idea:

The DoD has been selling off old ships that have been rusting in our harbors for a long time. The USS Enterprise was sold for a penny, hauled to Texas and broken up into some really good steel by a private company. The USS Constellation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constellation_%28CV-64%29 ) was recently sold and the US paid $300 grand to tow it to Texas.

Let's stop selling these things and use them to provide steel for all the infrastructure work that needs to be done.

Think of the jobs: Since we're starting out with really good already paid-for steel this is a win win win situation. Its gets rust buckets out of our harbors and provides a goodly amount of steel for most, if not all of the bridges that need repair.