You wouldn't use a hammer to fix your software problem. But in Washington, our leaders--the president and his congressional majority are attempting to fix our techology-based economy with machine-age tools.
Now that it's obvious that the president's $3 trillion stimulus packages haven't stimulated anything but the federal deficit, he and his allies in congress are proposing to up the tab with another $50 billion infrastructure stimulus package. It's the kind of spending programs that makes you think of a time when the United States was a land of farmers and factory laborers... the 1930s.
When economic disaster hit in the form of the Great Depression, the government rolled out make-work projects that built some our nation's most enduring landmarks and parks. It did little for unemployment or nothing for economic recovery. But we did get us some pretty nice trails through the Appalachian mountains and other places.
To actually get out of the economic malaise of the Depression, the nation had to wait for World War II to arrive. Nothing like a little war or get people back to work, or better yet, out of the labor market completely by putting them in uniform and shipping overseas. Besides putting millions to work building airplanes and ships, it sent most of the people who would have been unemployed off to Europe or into the Pacific to kill or be killed. Economic stagnation and unemployment solved: not by the economic policies of a president or congress, but by the irrational behavior of insane men in Berlin and Tokyo.
But the myth persists that the alphabet soup programs of the Roosevelt administration pulled the nation out of the worst economic disaster of the last century. The problem with this myth is that its believers are currently in charge of running this country. And worst of all, as true believers, they can't accept that not only were 1930s style programs inappropriate and ineffective in the 1930s, but they won't accept that these programs are even more inappropriate and less effective today. They continue to believe that the health of our post industrial, technology-based economy can be restored by spending billions of dollars that the government doesn't have, to build roads, bridges and train tracks. The trains to run on those tracks, by the way, would be produced by European or Asian companies since no U.S. company has built a train in more than two decades.
It's time for our leaders to stop trying to fix every 21st century problem with early 20th century tools. Just as we've moved beyond starting our automobiles by turning a crank, our economy and its problems are beyond being fixed by turning shovels of dirt.
