The brain trust in Washington doesn’t get it. Pumping money into infrastructure isn’t going to put enough people to work. How many bridge builders do you know? How many plumbers, electricians, roofers, dry-wallers or painters do you know who are out of work?
This is my take: from 1983 to 2007 we experienced a housing boom. We were losing manufacturing jobs overseas. The cry went out, but it wasn’t heeded. What was happening was a blue-collar work force migrating from manufacturing jobs to the building industry. It was lucrative and they came in droves. So the loss of jobs overseas was being pooh-poohed because the unemployment rate hovered around 4 percent. Then the housing market tanked. Fast-forward to 2009. All these people who were tethered to the building trades were out of work. Unemployment rose to 9 percent.
There are no jobs out there for the people that followed the scent. Manufacturing jobs do not exist in the numbers necessary to absorb the trades. So how do we get these people work? I’ve got a couple questions to pose. How many foreclosures do you have in your neighborhood? Are the homes in disrepair, like the ones I see on my street? Should we be holding the mortgage lenders who fed the building frenzy accountable, since they used lax regulations to bundle mortgages that they knew were precarious at best?
This is what I’m suggesting: force the lenders to be responsible for maintaining their foreclosed properties and keep it in saleable condition as opposed to their bulldoze mentality.
— Steve Moore, Cary
