Death spiral ?

The vast majority of Americans know that our elected representatives in Washington are not doing their job. And we know that, while they are obsessed with getting re-elected, our nation edges closer to the abyss.

President Obama’s job approval number has been in the tank for months and approval of Congress is at an all-time low. More significantly, there is no reason to believe that the forthcoming national election will do anything but reinforce the deadly stalemate between the Democrats and the Republicans.

The best current example of what these clowns are not grappling with is found in an article in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair by renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz. Titled “The Book of Jobs,’’ Stiglitz describes the nature of our worsening economic mess and the way to turn it around.

Stiglitz points out that we’ve made the same mistake with our current economic slump as we did back in the Great Depression. We wrongly assumed then and now that the heart of the problem was the banking system. It wasn’t. Huge infusions of taxpayer cash for the banks didn’t work then and hasn’t worked now.

And that’s because there was and is a much deeper problem. Stiglitz calls it a crisis in the real economy. In the 1930s, it was our dominant agriculture industry that collapsed and brought the banks and the rest of our economy down with it. Today it’s the implosion of our manufacturing economy that is under assault by global forces, including the information technology revolution.

What we are experiencing is the wrenching transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Today less than 10 percent of our workforce is engaged in manufacturing. Today’s jobless factory workers are the descendants of the Great Depression’s farmers who were forced off the land by macroeconomic forces they didn’t comprehend and couldn’t control.

And here’s the rub that the politicians won’t talk about and that most of us don’t realize. Stiglitz tells us that, just like in the ’30s, the economy won’t fix itself and that monetary policy intervention by the Fed won’t work either.

No, he argues that we’re going to have to rely upon what worked in the ’30s, — a massive investment program to increase productivity and employment. Before and during World War II it built the Arsenal of Democracy. Immediately thereafter it became the Marshall Plan.

Now we need a 21st-century Marshall Plan that will enable us to create the new American economy. It will have to focus on education, research and development, our infrastructure, biotechnology, clean energy and information technology.

Many of you will say we can’t afford it. And that’s exactly why the political class won’t even talk about its necessity. But the one thing we can be sure of is that our ignorance and their fear will take America to a very bad place. That’s a sure bet.

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