Showing posts with label recovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recovery. Show all posts
Living big at $7.25 an hour
The Times spent a few column inches yesterday mulling over the mystery of why the poverty rate hasn't budged in 30 years. Gosh. I don't know. I'm sure it can't have anything to do with the systematic decimation of organized labor and the shipping of American jobs to China and Mexico. Can't see how starving the free universal education system could have anything to do with it. It can't be because of all that expenditure of public wealth on the liberal project of empire-building instead of on the building roads and bridges and harbors and airports and hospitals and schools and housing here at home. Can't be that. You can't blame the war on drugs, or the creation of a vast army of former inmates without jobs, or the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on incarceration instead of education, on building prisons instead of schools. I'm sure it has nothing to do with Bill Clinton's welfare reforms. Surely it wasn't because the minimum wage wasn't linked to inflation or to worker productivity so that as the decades rolled by low end jobs were worth less and less. Couldn't be that. Certainly it had nothing to do with the mortgage crisis. Or allowing the banks to bleed us dry. Or slashing services for the poor and middle class so that taxes for the very wealthiest could be slashed, too. I can't think what the reason might be. Can you?
Press Release: Public Transit Projects Create More Jobs than Highways
(Washington DC 2010-09-02) New data released today by the Transportation Equity Network reveals that investment in public transit can create hundreds of thousands more jobs than highway projects.
More Transit Equals More Jobs examines official project lists from 20 federally authorized Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and concludes that
“if [they] shifted 50 percent of their highway funds to transit, they would generate an additional 184,801 jobs over a five-year period without spending any more money.”
“This report reveals just how much more bang we can get for our buck if we invest in transit,” said Dan Smith, a transportation associate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG). “Transit provides important benefits to communities and, with unemployment so high, this is data that should not be ignored.”
Previous studies, including examinations of federal Recovery Act spending, have consistently found that public transportation creates more jobs than highways. Investment in public transit tends to be more labor-intensive than highway projects because the work is generally more complex, involves the purchase and maintenance of vehicles, and requires much less spending on land acquisition.
More Transit Equals More Jobs makes a broad case for larger investments in our public transit systems. More money for transit not only means more jobs but would additionally lead to less traffic congestion, hazardous pollution, and global warming emissions. # # #
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization. For more information visit http://www.uspirg.org.
More Transit Equals More Jobs examines official project lists from 20 federally authorized Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and concludes that
“if [they] shifted 50 percent of their highway funds to transit, they would generate an additional 184,801 jobs over a five-year period without spending any more money.” “This report reveals just how much more bang we can get for our buck if we invest in transit,” said Dan Smith, a transportation associate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG). “Transit provides important benefits to communities and, with unemployment so high, this is data that should not be ignored.”
Previous studies, including examinations of federal Recovery Act spending, have consistently found that public transportation creates more jobs than highways. Investment in public transit tends to be more labor-intensive than highway projects because the work is generally more complex, involves the purchase and maintenance of vehicles, and requires much less spending on land acquisition.
More Transit Equals More Jobs makes a broad case for larger investments in our public transit systems. More money for transit not only means more jobs but would additionally lead to less traffic congestion, hazardous pollution, and global warming emissions. # # #
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization. For more information visit http://www.uspirg.org.
Recovery: The New New Deal
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont proposes investing in infrastructure:
When the Senate reconvenes of November 17th, I intend to fight for an economic recovery program that is significant enough in size and scope to respond to the major economic crisis this country now faces. If we can commit more than $1 trillion to rescue bankers and insurance companies from their reckless and irresponsible behavior, we certainly should be investing in millions of good-paying jobs that rebuild our nation and improve its economy....The rest of the story: The Road to Economic Recovery by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Huffington Post, 2008-11-7)
This economic recovery package should first improve our crumbling infrastructure by improving our roads, bridges and public transportation. We need to bring our water and sewer systems into the 21st century. We need to make certain that high-quality Internet service is available in every community in America. Not only are these investments desperately needed, every billion dollars that we put into these initiatives will create up to 47,000 new jobs.
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