Jobs

The biggest thing about poverty is that people tend to focus on the fact that someone who is poor doesn't have enough money, as opposed to the fact of why that person doesn't have enough money - education, lack of a good job, health, etc... As a result, many of our efforts to stem the tide of poverty are focused on getting poor people more money and not on helping poor people overcome the things that caused them to be poor in the first place.

If you look at the current policies in place here and abroad, you will see that we are generally focusing on the wrong things. Our health care bill, while addressing the issue of health as a means for creating poor people, left out the fact that health care costs are much higher than they should be. You can't solve a problem of making poor people healthy if you make people rich off the health of the poor. Its not a sustainable policy. Health has to not only be available to all people, it has to be affordable to all people as well. Same thing with all these bailout initiatives being thrown around. They end up saving large companies from going bankrupt, but do nothing to create jobs, help educate people, save health care benefits, etc... We'd rather throw money at unemployment benefits than use money to create lasting employment of people.

I think where this issue can really be seen is in the new proposal by the 50 top billionaires to give away half of their money to charity. I think that's an admirable goal and I won't even mention how they got that money to begin with. However, the idea, while great, is wrong and won't actually do anything to help poverty in this world. It would be far better, for instance, to use that money to create jobs doing things that were previously considered impossibly too expensive.

As an example, Africa needs roads. African people need jobs. Put that money into road building projects throughout Africa. Build their infrastructure at no expense to Africa. Hire Africans to do the labor. At the end of all that money, Africa's economy will be far more robust than it would have been had you just thrown money at charities and they'll have new infrastructure in place for many years to come.

The same could be done here. I know that there are many initiatives on the books by the Obama administration. Its time to start fast-tracking them. Americans need jobs. Take the first 52 projects that are off the shelf and fund them. One a week. Each project should hire at least 1000 Americans and pay them a decent wage. If that doesn't work, double it, or quadruple it. Let's rebuild our own infrastructure. Let's upgrade our energy distribution network. Let's rebuild some of those nature trails.

Let's put money in education that doesn't come with strings attached. School teachers working is a hell of a lot more important than school reform. How about school nurses? And new gymnasiums? If you're really serious about getting obese kids healthy, how about spending some money on gym teachers and gyms?

America needs to let go of the last twenty years of bi-partisan bickering and start taking its problems seriously. I say this as a Democrat with a Democratic Majority - we Americans are tired of all the infighting and backstabbing and name-calling. Its not important whether Obama was right or wrong about some Mosque in New York - he was wrong to have even mentioned the subject. Our problems are much greater than that. Put people to work and they'll have no time left for tea parties or Quran burnings or isolationist politics.

Oh, and we need to put people on Mars... but that's the subject of another post...