OPINION:
The job numbers are in and they don’t look good. Nearly 7 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, a total exceeding most projections and setting sad historic records. The week before more than 3 million had. As the coronavirus increases its havoc across the country — medical consensus has it that we have yet to reach “peak” infection — the economy will continue to crater in ways we haven’t witnessed since the Great Depression.
So, what’s to be done on the economic front?
For starters, the $2 trillion stimulus bill, along with a bevy of other, separate economic relief packages were good steps in the right directions. These initiatives should get much-needed financial assistance to individuals, and businesses large and small.
What comes next, however, might be the icing on the economic cake — a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, designed both to get Americans working, and to start long-overdue repairs on everything from roads, rails and bridges, and judging by the murmurs, everything else in between.
The infrastructure bill, a deal long-sought by both President Donald Trump and Democratic opponents alike, is a rare piece of bipartisan legislation that has the potential to effectuate some real common good. It should be supported, even if aspects of the fine print are likely, like the earlier waves of federal aid reveal Democrats as having added ludicrous, crony-supporting line items.
Senate Republicans have shown more consternation over the package than the president, who a few days ago tweeted the bill “should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country!,” noting that with interest rates at a favorable zero, the time was ripe to put the initiative into motion.
The worry Republican leadership evinces is understandable. After all, another $2 trillion added to the national debt is another $2 trillion future generations — already under dark clouds of economic despair — will have to figure out how to pay off. Democrats, historically known less for financial prudence than a desire to spend, spend, spend, appear less concerned.
But political philosophies and partisan jostling is not — and we stress this — the point. The point is figuring out how to get those Americans that can, safely back to work. The point is to take advantage of temporarily favorable economic conditions to repair the bones of a country everyone agrees are creaking if not broken. The point is to provide Americans with tangible hope that there is a way out of this alternatingly real and existential paralysis.
So to the leadership of both parties, cut out the bickering and pass an infrastructure bill that serves the nearly 330 million people who look to you to act. Get to work, so that Americans can, too.
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