No one offering what the economy needs now

Joel Kotkin: "Forget Second Stimulus; We Need Economic Vision"

Here are excerpts:

"Whatever the politics, no new stimulus should be considered unless it deals with the fundamental illness undermining the country’s long-term economic prospects. Such a stimulus would address the country’s essential problem: persistent overconsumption amid underproduction. Neither party wants to address this issue because neither chooses to understand it. From the very beginning, the Obama administration has viewed the stimulus as a political issue, not an economic one...

"Instead, we have witnessed a grab bag of political handouts — Chicago machine politics on a grand scale — designed to placate key Democratic constituencies. Most have gone to what my old teacher Michael Harrington described as “the social-industrial complex” consisting of the education industry, social service providers and the various government bureaucracies.

"As a recent New America Foundation report makes clear, precious little has gone to the productive side of the economy that determines the country’s competitiveness and creates many high-paying blue-collar jobs. Infrastructure, a critical component of any productivity-enhancing strategy, has accounted for barely 10 percent of the package.

"The results have not been pretty for the productive sectors of the economy. Construction workers now have higher than 19 percent unemployment; jobs in this sector have fallen during the past year in 333 out of 352 metropolitan areas, with more than 200 plunging by double digits. Meanwhile, the hard-pressed manufacturing sector suffers more than 12 percent unemployment...

"Even prospects for the auto industry — the one manufacturing sector that the administration has effectively annexed — are threatened by plans to enact policies that will “coerce” Americans out of their cars. This amounts to trying to “save” an industry by destroying it.

Read the whole article if you want to understand what stands in the way of returning to prosperity: http://www.newgeography.com/content/00939-forget-second-stimulus-we-need-economic-vision