Work needed

The haggling in Congress over whether to pay the credit card bill for money already spent reveals how at least one party has lost sense of any priorities.

We're in the midst of a national jobs emergency, yet the president and Congress have lost months in the debt-ceiling sideshow. As former Intel CEO Andy Grove has been saying for some time, we need a "job-centric" economic theory and "job-centric" political leadership.

Our national leaders need to get beyond ideological rigidity to address the plight of the unemployed with practical realism.

They might begin by walking over to the National Mall and reading a 1934 quote at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial: "No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order."

One of Roosevelt's remedies was "labor-creating, quick-acting, useful projects." Our national leaders should embrace that ethic again.

The notion today that we can solve unemployment by having everyone reinvent themselves to become "knowledge workers" or Facebook-style startup entrepreneurs is wishful thinking.

We have crumbling infrastructure everywhere. We have construction workers out of work. A back-of-the-napkin cost to create one million jobs at $30,000 a year each would be $30 billion. We have to start looking for it.

There's also a need for bipartisan support on a national infrastructure bank to leverage local, state and private investment in infrastructure with a capital base provided initially by the federal government. Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, introduced their BUILD Act in March.

Certainly, public works are not the only solution. But in this abnormal jobs emergency, government will have to do things it doesn't normally do.

- The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee