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.

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