Trump needs a new Marshall plan

Trump needs a new Marshall plan

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

December 19, 2016

As World War II ended, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had the vision to propose the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan.

Europe lay in ruins. Its nations’ economies had been devastated, and their infrastructures pulverized. Although the war had been won, peace was by no means assured, and the future of democracy in western Europe hung in the balance.

The United States faced a monumental decision. It could turn inward, rely on the ephemeral protection of the two great oceans that appeared to buffer it from the war’s devastation and the emerging Soviet threat. Or it could take the lead in confronting these problems. America chose to engage.

In 1944 President Roosevelt proposed the GI Bill. Once enacted it opened the door to education and job training for almost eight million American service men and women. Then President Truman and Gen. George Marshall proposed the Marshall Plan. Both programs won bipartisan support.

Today we need another, a very different, bipartisan Marshall Plan and GI Bill, one that is tailored to America’s 21st century needs, and one that will create an American renaissance.

This nation’s infrastructure is in shambles. The signs of decay and danger are everywhere evident. Makes no difference where you look: roads, bridges, the electric grid, underground pipelines, airports, railroads, dams, or nuclear waste, America is in trouble. The unavoidable truth is that our Rust Belt is not confined to the Midwest. It stretches from sea to shining sea. It’s what happens when the nation lacks the resolve to do what it must do to preserve its supremacy.

On Nov. 3, 2010 President Obama said, “it makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth — that used to be us.” He was right, but lamenting the obvious, while doing virtually nothing about it doesn’t cut it.

The deterioration of America’s infrastructure is well documented. Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issues a Report Card on the state of nation’s infrastructure. It last Report Card, published in 2013, doesn’t paint a pretty picture. It’s overall grade point average for the 16 categories it covers is D+--meaning, at risk.

Turning this sorry situation around won’t be cheap. In 2013 ASCE estimated it would require an investment of $3.6 trillion by 2020.

ASCE’s next report will be available in March, just in time to be relevant as Congress considers what is widely expected to be President Trump’s infrastructure initiative. If Trump is daring and proposes a 21st century Marshall Plan for America it will have another enormous benefit — jobs.

Since 2000 the nation has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs, as firms have closed plants and left the country, and as automation, technology and robotics continue to revolutionize the workplace. An infrastructure rebuild will immediately benefit many of those Americans who have been the casualties of our contracting industrial economy. A massive infrastructure rebuild will enable many, who now sit in despair on the sidelines of the American economy, to find good-paying jobs. For the near term future that will be magic in a bottle for them. But for the long term it will be woefully insufficient.

Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum, wrote earlier this year, “we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. The transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.”

The American workforce is unprepared for the transformation of the world economy now underway. If we permit that curve to get ahead of us, our national supremacy will sputter and die.

Thus, the infrastructure rebuild must also provide the funding that will place American workers in the forefront of what’s coming, an economy that will integrate physical, digital and biological realms in ways that are largely still unknown. Funding for this job training and creation effort should come from an earmark of the federal funding for the infrastructure rebuild that is then matched by all of the entities receiving such funding.

First in line for such advanced education and training should be those Americans whose jobs have been lost since 9/11 and veterans who have served honorably since 9/11 plus the 40,000 veterans who are homeless.

Want to make America great again? This is the beginning.

I welcome comments:  Please contact me at:  

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Menotti's enduring Christmas gift

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Hendersonville Times

BlueRidgeNow.com

December 18, 2016

Christmas is about presents, right? It’s certainly not about Christ or Christianity. There’s ample proof of that. We don’t count down the days till Christ’s birthday. We count down the SHOPPING days till Christmas.

It all begins with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which used to be called the Macy’s Christmas Parade. And regardless of what it’s called, we know Macy’s is in the business of selling stuff, not Christ. Heck, too many Americans now acquiesce to the notion that saying the words “Merry Christmas” is a form of religious intolerance. Political correctness demands we say, “Happy holidays.” How about we just say, “Happy stuff”?

Moreover, the selling frenzy has been taken to new heights. We’ve got Black Friday (which now begins on Thanksgiving), Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. And when we finally get to Dec. 25, the conversation is all about what we got, not what we gave.

So, since Christmas is all about presents, I want to tell you about my greatest Christmas present ever. I hope it may cause you to think, or rethink, what your very best Christmas present has been, or could be.

Come back with me now to Christmas Eve 1951. I was 13, and earlier that year we got our first TV. It was a black and white RCA with a 12½-inch screen. It was housed in a large wooden cabinet in order to accommodate its massive picture tube and its numerous and relatively short-lived vacuum tubes. For our family and millions of other families, it opened a wholly new and exciting world.

And on Christmas Eve that year, that TV brought into our living room the debut of what was to become television at its very best, the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” program. That Christmas Eve, it presented Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera for children of all ages, “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” It was broadcast live.

Don’t let the word “opera” turn you off. Back then, I couldn’t sing, read music or play an instrument, and that has never changed. None of those limitations was consequential that Christmas Eve as my family and I tuned in to NBC and went to the opera.

Menotti had been commissioned by NBC to write the first opera for television. While he intended to write an opera for children, he faced an oncoming Christmas deadline without any clear idea of what to write. But then, as Menotti visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in November, he came upon “The Adoration of the Kings” by Hieronymus Bosch. It reminded him of his childhood in Italy and how children there believed their Christmas gifts were brought not by Santa Claus but by the Three Kings. Bosch’s portrait of the Magi gave Menotti just the inspiration he needed.

After the dress rehearsal just days before Christmas Eve, Arturo Toscanini, director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, told Menotti, “This is the best you’ve ever done.”

Amahl, a disabled boy, and his mother live in grinding poverty near Bethlehem. They are Arabs. Amahl has an outsized imagination, and his mother does not believe him when he tells her of a gigantic star over their roof. She also does not believe him when he tells her that three kings are at the door and wish to rest for the night.

But the star is there, and so are the kings. They come from the east, and they follow a star. One is a Persian, another an Indian, and the third a Babylonian. Like Amahl and his mother, they are not Jews. They are on their way to offer gifts to an infant they believe to be the newborn King of the Jews.

Amahl and his mother also want to offer gifts to the child, but they have nothing — until Amahl offers to give his crutch to the kings to take to Jesus. When he makes the offer, his leg is miraculously healed, and he then leaves with the Magi as they complete their journey.

My takeaway from that splendid program was the miracle that healed Amahl. It took me another 38 years to realize that I had missed Menotti’s real meaning of Amahl.

Since 1951, “Amahl and the Night Visitors” has been performed on every continent and seen by more people than any other opera in history. Just before Christmas in 1989, it played at the Eisenhower Theater in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. My wife and I went. I wanted to see it again, and she had never seen it. The staging was remarkable with falling snow and real goats.

It was there that I first understood that opera’s real meaning. It all had to do with the juxtaposition of the three kings’ gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh with Amahl’s gift of his crutch. The Magi had immense power and wealth. Their gifts came easy. But Amahl’s crutch was not only the only thing he had, it was the one thing that gave him the ability to walk. He had no reason to believe that offering his crutch to the Christ child would lead to his miraculous healing.

And that is the magic in Menotti’s “Amahl.” It’s an enduring Christmas present for each of us, if we open our minds and our hearts.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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How Trump handles Obamacare will set his presidency's course

Commentary: How Trump handles Obamacare will set his presidency's course

By Stuart H. Shapiro

and LeRoy Goldman

Philly.com

The Inquirer Daily News

December 1, 2016

The most important question facing Donald Trump is whether he has the vision and the courage to serve as president of all Americans, as he proclaimed during his victory speech, or whether he will take the path of both his immediate predecessors and serve only the half of America that elected him. That choice is monumentally difficult. You only have to look at the recent protests in Philadelphia and elsewhere to witness the fear, anger, and dismay of those who won't accept the result of a free election that dealt them a surprising and profound loss.

What Trump chooses to do right out of the gate will set the tone for all that comes after. If he's going to go big, as he likes to do, then he's got to start big - and nothing is bigger than Obamacare.

President Obama chose, unwisely, at the outset of his administration to embark upon health-care reform. By jamming a bill through the House and Senate without careful consideration of the specifics of the legislation, he and the Democrats in Congress were both naive and unwise, and they paid dearly for it. Their tunnel vision cost them the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Since then, Obamacare has torn the nation in half. It has become a rallying cry for the right and a symbol of progressivism for the left. On Nov. 8, its chickens came home to roost on the White House lawn.

The Obama administration's assumptions about its costs and enrollment in Obamacare have been wildly wrong. The legislation is named the Affordable Care Act, and it's anything but that for those who have to pay for it. Today, it teeters on the brink of collapse as premiums skyrocket and insurance companies flee its marketplace.

The Republicans, for their part, have been just as unwise and bullheaded. The House has voted symbolically more than 25 times to repeal Obamacare, all to no avail. The Senate expended considerable energy and used the arcane budget reconciliation procedure to get a repeal bill on Obama's desk, knowing full well that he would veto it.

Now, with the election of Trump, most Republicans are licking their chops for revenge wanting to light a bonfire fueled by the thousands of pages of Obamacare. If Trump buys into that mean-spirited strategy, he will sacrifice his chance to be a transformational president. He must chart a different and better course.

What is to be done? Here are the essential elements that Trump and Tom Price, the nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, must make part of a of a bipartisan solution: Terminate the Obamacare mandate that forces Americans to enroll in it. Terminate the program's tax penalties. Abolish the crumbling exchanges. Authorize insurance companies to sell policies across state lines. Expand health savings accounts. Enact tort reform. Allow young people up to age 26 to remain on their parents' policies. Don't let insurance companies deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Deem eligible for Medicaid anyone now covered under Obamacare if they cannot find or afford coverage in the private marketplace. These policies would hold harmless the 21 million people now covered by Obamacare.

After developing the broad outlines of this plan, Trump needs to explain it to the nation in a prime time address. Then he must take congressional leaders and key committee chairmen, from both sides, to Camp David. He and Price can present their plan, say they are open to improvements, stressing the need for bipartisanship, and make clear that the helicopters back to Capitol Hill will not be available until a deal has been reached. That was the bipartisan way the legislative process worked when each of us led the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health, and how it needs to work today.

If the new president does that, a new day dawns in Washington, one that is long overdue, and one that will be welcomed by the vast majority of the American people, no matter whom they voted for on Election Day. Indeed, if successful, Trump would prove that he is a master deal maker in the league with Lyndon Johnson, Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan, and Ted Kennedy.

The columnists can be reached at:

Stuart H. Shapiro is a former Philadelphia health commissioner. shapirostu@gmail.com

LeRoy Goldman is a former associate director at the National Institutes of Health. tks12no12@gmail.com