It is hard to argue with Nouriel Roubini about unemployment, but his solution caught my eye especially:
There’s really just one hope for our leaders to turn things around: a bold prescription that increases the fiscal stimulus with another round of labor-intensive, shovel-ready infrastructure projects, helps fiscally strapped state and local governments and provides a temporary tax credit to the private sector to hire more workers. Helping the unemployed just by extending unemployment benefits is necessary not sufficient; it leads to persistent unemployment rather than job creation.
Shovel-ready jobs from the government are not a long term solution. Why not call those jobs for what they are: welfare. Consider this famous story:
A businessman was touring China a few years ago and he came upon a team of nearly 100 workers building an earthen dam with shovels. The businessman commented to a local official that, with an earth-moving machine, a single worker could create the dam in an afternoon. The official’s curious response was, “Yes, but think of all the unemployment that would create.” “Oh,” said the businessman, “I thought you were building a dam. If it’s jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons!”
Instead of welfare Obama should go on TV and make this point in some eloquent manner:
- Citizens of America the game has changed permanently. You can no longer depend on the 1950s way of life — security is dead.
- Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that will provide you nothing.
- The government jobs we are creating now are busy work jobs that offer you NO long term future.
- Use the internet to make money now before someone else does and leaves you behind.
- If you are waiting for the government to fix your finances you will end up as the poorest of all Americans.
- Stop whining about the Chinese or whomever. Get over it.
Those would be a start to an honest dialogue.
