What Should We Do about the Economy?

People of my generation grew up hearing stories from our parents about how bad things were during the Depression, and also about how poor their family was when they were kids and how hard they had to work for very little pay. I never doubted their stories. I knew they were true because I had seen the old movies on TV showing the same.

There were lots of poor people living in my Central Area neighborhood where I grew up in Seattle. But the years of my childhood were relatively good ones in our economy and I don't remember any bleak times of recession or depression. Boeing was the big employer and it's workforce size varied dramatically, but that never affected me directly since I never worked for Boeing and neither did my parents.

I remember the Boeing Bust [the Boeing workforce was cut from 80,400 to 37,200 between early 1970 and October 1971] with the billboard about the last person leaving Seattle making sure to turn off the light, but I was not directly affected. I was working for a real estate title insurance company as an attorney and my job was secure no matter what - title insurance is needed for home sales and mortgages, and title reports are needed for mortgage foreclosures.

The gas crisis in 1973 and 1974 was not an economic challenge for me. The problem was not the price of gas, but rather the availability, with gas being rationed on an every other day basis dependent on the last license plate digit. I ran dry a few times and had to walk. The associated decline in the stock market did not affect me, nor did the ones in 1976, 1981, 1987 and 1990, because in all those years I had a low overhead private law practice and a wife and four kids to support and did not have enough money to have any stock market investments.

The more recent downturns have been during my retirement years. I knew the post 9/11 slowdown was only going to be temporary, but the current problems are different and much deeper, and they have impacted me directly via my mutual fund values declining significantly. Like many investors, I am just riding it out. But many younger, working people cannot just wait around. They need work and money to make house payments and they are concerned about their economic future. People want to know what we should do about the economy.

We need to get things moving now, put people to work and restore confidence that our government is working to get us back on track. Infrastructure projects that are ready to go but need funding are a good place to start. The Depression stories I heard as a child included stories about people going to work through government programs, doing things they believed were worthwhile and that made them feel good about themselves again.

Longer term, we need technical training programs to enable people to acquire skills that can be employed locally and not outsourced, jobs that are good for people and for our economy and environment. Computer and appliance repair and home energy efficiency improvement installation are examples. We also need to encourage innovation and invention, to enable individuals to build the proverbial better mousetrap - something that could be jump started by a Federal program administered locally.

Extending unemployment benefits and increasing grants and loans for education should be a first priority. Loss of talent to school drop out syndromes should be attacked by incentives and other programs. New efforts to early match young people to a career course should be made, kindling excitement in young people as they learn what skills they possess and how they want to develop and use them.

We need to look back at the crooks and scoundrels who exacerbated this mess. Crooks should be vigorously prosecuted with the criminal system as a deterrent to future offenses, giving long terms to white collar criminals rather than soft time and wrist slaps. Scoundrels should be aggressively sued in the civil courts to go after their ill-gotten gains. Make these high-rollers pay the price in terms of legal fees, settlements and judgments. Shame the shameful, those who took the pay and assumed the responsibility but were too lazy or uninterested to actually do the job. This latter group includes many civic leaders who accept positions on corporate boards to pad their own resumes and lend civic credibility to corporate predators.

The whole concept of corporations needs to be re-examined and reformed. In theory they are limited entities subject to marketplace democracy. But in fact they are eternal monoliths run by oligarchies using money of under-informed private persons and abetted by public subsidies.