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Education, housing, healthcare, green energy (including manufacture), transportation (roads, bridges, rail), these should be considered essential infrastructure when we get about rebuilding the country's economy. Mr. Leonard is correct to point out that individual consumers, prudent or not with their spending decisions, can't effect the glaring infrastructure problems we face after these many years of economic profligacy. Nor can huge financial bailouts to the banks and robber barons of the financial industry bring about the changes that we need.
Mr. Leonard is correct to argue that it's the government that needs to do the investment in these items of actual infrastructure. The list I offer above is not exhaustive; there are surely things I've left off, like child care, care for the elderly and mentally ill, rebuilding cities, things that have been shamefully neglected in this country for decades. The necessary sea change, at this juncture, is for us Americans to try to conceive of our government as one that actually tries to take care of us first and foremost, by assuring protections in health, education, employment, and doesn't function simply as a handmaiden to the corporate swine who've driven us to this point. Of course national defense goes on the list, but a less bloated, profit-driven version.
The most sensible ideas I have heard along these lines come from Bob Kuttner (Obama's Challenge), who argues that government spending, as a percentage of GDP, should increase from its current level of about 20%, to 40-60% (more in line with levels of spending in the European democracies) and that this spending should be on these types of infrastructure. That is where the cash should come from to get us going again and that's how it should be spent. I'm no economist (obviously), but of all the talk about how to get things going in a sensible direction, Mr. Kuttner's ideas don't stink coming out of the box. Unlike, say, Paulson's.
