We have spent the better part of a year locked in a tedious and unenlightening debate over health care while the jobless rate has steadily surged. It’s now at 10.2 percent. Families struggling with job losses, foreclosures and bankruptcies are falling out of the middle class like fruit through the bottom of a rotten basket.
The jobless rate for men 16 years old and over is 11.4 percent. For blacks, it’s a back-breaking 15.7 percent.
We need to readjust our focus. We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit is down for the count.
I would tell the president that more and more Americans are questioning his priorities, including millions who went to the mat for him in last year’s election. The biggest issue by far for most Americans is employment. The lack of jobs is fueling the nervousness, anxiety and full-blown anger that are becoming increasingly evident.
Last Friday, a huge crowd of fans marched in a ticker-tape parade in downtown Manhattan to celebrate the Yankees’ World Series championship. More than once, as the fans passed through the financial district, the crowd erupted in rhythmic, echoing chants of “Wall Street sucks! Wall Street sucks!”
I would tell the president that the feeling is widespread that his administration went too far with its bailouts of the financial industry, sending not just a badly needed lifeline but also unwarranted windfalls to the miscreants who nearly wrecked the entire economy.
The perception is that Wall Street is doing just fine while working people, whose taxes financed the bailouts, are walking the plank to economic oblivion.
I would also tell him that rebuilding the economy in a way that allows working Americans to flourish will require a sustained monumental effort, not just bits and pieces of legislation here and there. But such an effort will never get off the ground, will never have any chance of reaching critical mass and actually succeeding, as long as we insist on feeding young, healthy American men and women and endless American dollars into the relentless meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.
We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building at home is incompatible with the demands of war. We’ve managed to keep the worst of the carnage — and the staggering costs — of Iraq and Afghanistan well out of the sight of most Americans, so the full extent of the terrible price we are paying is not widely understood.
The ultimate financial costs will be counted in the trillions. If you were to take a walk around one of the many military medical centers, your heart would break at the sight of the heroic young men and women who have lost limbs or who are blind or paralyzed or horribly burned.
Hundreds of thousands have suffered psychological wounds. Many have contemplated or tried suicide, and many succeeded.
“Mr. President,” I would say, “we’ll never be right as a nation as long as we allow this to continue.”
While we’re preparing to pour more resources into Afghanistan, the Economic Policy Institute tells us that one in five American children lives in poverty, that nearly 35 percent of African-American children live in poverty, and that the unemployment crisis is pushing us toward a point in the coming years where more than half of all black children in this country will be poor.
“Mr. President,” I would say, “we need your help.”
Bob Herbert writes for The New York Times.
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