To: President Donald Trump, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate
We Demand Jobs for Our Fellow Americans. We Demand Massive Public Works Spending to Re-employ Mil...
We demand massive fiscal stimulus of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion per year in public works, science and technological investment, and assistance to alleviate suffering of the unemployed. Austerity is a false approach that only further generates a self-defeating downward economic spiral instead of restoring normal demand levels to the economy. The Finance industry is currently being stimulated to the tune of $1 trillion per year in fiat currency (dollars created for this purpose) under the Federal Reserve's "Quantitative Easing." The unemployed citizens of the United States deserve no less, especially considering that the unemployed are the casualties of Finance Industry greed and dishonesty.
Why is this important?
Millions of Americans remain unemployed but are no longer being counted in the common unemployment numbers typically broadcast. By looking instead at a more reliable statistic we see a drop of 5 percentage points in the percentage of the population EMPLOYED (over age 16) occurred with the economic meltdown. That percentage dipped from 63.4% to 58.5% and has only improved about 0.3 percentage points in about the last 3.5 years. In other words, we are not making progress in re-employing millions of Americans, we are only keeping pace with population growth with our limited level of job creation. Economists Paul Krugman and Dean Baker note that our unemployed or underemployed friends and family and other fellow Americans won't get full-time jobs back for even many more years without massive fiscal stimulus to restore normal demand levels in the economy.
[Further explanation added 8/23/13, 8/28/13:] We need a wide range of (non-off-shorable) investments: from infrastructure construction (roads, bridges, rail, airports, harbors, canals); to rehiring of laid-off state and local employees foolishly laid-off (due to lack of federal emergency support to states); to design and manufacture of trains, spacecraft, and defense hardware; to broad-ranging scientific and technical research. The point is to get people back into productive work in the economy, spending money to fuel an upward spiral of increasing demand in the economy as more people can then buy more goods and services to fuel hiring of more and more people to meet the increasing demand. We have a skilled, energetic, intelligent citizenry to put back to work productively.
[Further explanation added 8/23/13, 8/28/13:] We need a wide range of (non-off-shorable) investments: from infrastructure construction (roads, bridges, rail, airports, harbors, canals); to rehiring of laid-off state and local employees foolishly laid-off (due to lack of federal emergency support to states); to design and manufacture of trains, spacecraft, and defense hardware; to broad-ranging scientific and technical research. The point is to get people back into productive work in the economy, spending money to fuel an upward spiral of increasing demand in the economy as more people can then buy more goods and services to fuel hiring of more and more people to meet the increasing demand. We have a skilled, energetic, intelligent citizenry to put back to work productively.