Today, TAPPED will feature a series of guest posts on progressive solutions to the unemployment problem. Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large for The American Prospect. As usual, the redoubtable Dean Baker has a slew of smart suggestions -- all of them Keynesian -- on how to restart our stalled economy. I particularly like his work-sharing suggestion, partly modeled on the German experience (and German unemployment is at least 2 points lower than ours just now). One area where we could clearly boost employment is our infrastructure, which, despite the ministrations of the Obama administration's first stimulus package, could still use several trillion dollars of fixing up, according to the nation's association of our civil engineers. Funding such a massive endeavor to scale would require the creation of a national infrastructure bank, a project that Felix Rohatyn has been championing for years, and that progressive Connecticut Democrat Rosa de Lauro has been stumping for in Congress. There's also no reason why states can't establish infrastructure banks of their own: Indeed, since states can't run a deficit, they have even more reason than the feds do to establish a job-creating, road-bridge-airport-building institution that functions independent of the state's yearly budget. All that takes time, of course, even as getting the stimulus dollars out to the states and cities have taken time. What our current recovery efforts are lacking is the speed and spirit of a Harry Hopkins -- FDR's job-creating whiz, who put 3 million people on the payroll of the Civil Works Administration in just 90 days in the winter of 1933-1934, fixing up and building military bases, airports, and roads; and then who did it again, with even larger numbers, in the Works Progress Administration from 1935 through 1938. The ideological obstacles to a neo-WPA are considerable today, but even if one were enacted, it's hard to imagine we could get it up and running as quickly as Hopkins did. We don't just haul off and build things today: Projects need the approval of many agencies, at all levels of government, that didn't exist back in the '30s. In a sense, both left and right have contributed to the obstacles to finding a swift solution to an economic crisis: Conservatives oppose the very idea of such a program, while liberals have created a series of checks on growth, generally sensible in normal times, that have the (largely) unintended effect of delaying anything resembling a Hopkins-like response to an economic crisis. That's one reason why it's taken so long to get the Obama stimulus funds spent -- at least, so long in comparison to the '30s. But with official unemployment in the construction sector hovering at 25 percent, it's time for a public jobs program that gears up with not-so-deliberate speed. And there are plenty of sectors where we could use such a program besides construction as well. One sector that particularly needs some help is manufacturing. The Obama administration is flirting with some very soft domestic content regulations in its jobs proposals. One such flirtation is its proposal to create a $5 billion tax credit for the domestic manufacture of green technology (a $2.2 billion credit in its first stimulus package was oversubscribed). This is most commendable, but with China still depressing the value of its currency on the low end, and with Germany maintaining its lead in producing high-end technology, American manufacturing needs all the help it can get to grow again. Creating a clear preference for American-made goods in the next round of stimulus spending would help revitalize a sector that's as efficient as any in the world, but that has waned as its government has failed to champion it. If we're serious about creating more exports, and more jobs, it's time for our government to help manufacturing. --Harold Meyerson
