Power to the People
David Frum might as well change his last name to Dumb. In an interview on Marketplace he blames the state of the economy on stagnating wages. This assumes that you still have wages.
DAVID FRUM: Like many Republicans, I don’t much care for Barack Obama’s economic plans. From our point of view, he is using an emergency in the financial markets as a cover to launch America into a huge, costly long-term spending program of little probable value.
Obama’s infrastructure plans are bad ideas. But they do respond to a real problem.
Even before the recession, even before the financial crisis, the income of the typical American worker was stagnating. After inflation, the median American worker earned no more in early 2007 than he or she had earned seven years before.
So he is acknowledging that the U.S. worker did not see an increase in their wages under Bush. What he refuses to acknowledge though is the fact that we need to fix bridges, fill in pot holes and replace aging infrastructure. Bridge collapses in Minnesota, exploding pipe lines in New York City and a wave of air traffic controller retirements (thanks to Reagan busting the ATC unions, most controllers are nearing retirement age).
What “little probable value” is there in keeping the roads smooth? What “little probable value” is there in replacing crumbling sewage lines and sagging bridges? What “little probable value” is there adding additional power lines and electrical capacity to the nation? It is this last notion that seems to be where Frum is going. There is no value in adding solar collecting power plants, no value in propping up some windmills on empty land, no value in employing hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. citizens in jobs that as Obama stated, “cannot be outsourced”. There is, in fact, tremendous value in keeping our people working. There is tremendous value in safeguarding our roadways and infrastructure and tremendous value in building out our electrical grid, slowly supplementing existing power production and eventually supplanting it. There is only so long that we can suckle at the Texaco teat.
