weekly response

The Problems Money Won't Solve

By Leo Brown  

[President Obama's Weekly Address]

President Obama has announced that, after a decade of war and deep involvement in foreign military affairs, "the nation we need to rebuild is our own." We are at a turning point, the President suggests - Muammar Gadaffi and Osama bin Laden have been killed, American troops will leave Iraq by the holidays - and from this point, we can anticipate a more peaceful and prosperous future.

It's a remarkably pragmatic idea. We've made some progress towards our military goals, but meanwhile, our country has hit the fan, and so we'll take this moment to reconsider our game plan.

In theory, the conclusion of the Iraq War should free up some dollars that could be spent solving some of our biggest challenges: the deficit, unemployment, student debt, the education system, and infrastructure. Obviously, students shouldn't have to borrow thousands of dollars to attend a university. Schools shouldn't need to choose between a music department and a gym. And no one should have to wonder whether it's best to buy heat or medicine. We can spend our Iraq money here.

But most fifty-year-olds will never move a touchscreen so nimbly as their daughters. What are they to do when the plant shuts down?

Green and advanced manufacturing can replace some of these twentieth-century jobs. But that might not be enough. So many industries no longer need manual labor. On top of this, advanced technology, touted as our economic savior, often is designed specifically to eliminate human workers. This is their definition of success (see: E-ZPass).

Unemployed college graduates are in trouble, but their parents have it worse. The world is working quickly to make their skills obsolete. And this doesn't only affect people who are approaching retirement: millions of new adults remain undereducated and poor. Fifty years ago, they (the white and male) could have found a job in the plant. But Americans today are not going to compete with illegal immigrants for farm work; they can make more money by collecting unemployment. So what should they do instead? Start a small business? Open a wine shop? Try it. See what happens.

Our economy has seen paradigm shifts before. More than two centuries ago, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Until then, cotton was not a very productive crop; though it is easy to grow in the South, it took too long to pick out all the seeds. This was no longer a hindrance, and the American economic capacity skyrocketed.

Likewise, if some genius (or anyone else) can come with an idea to put our undereducated labor to work, a project that truly requires their skills, our economy will once again have a future. For now, we will continue to cannibalize our workforce, churning out "smart" technology that puts the common man out of a job.

It's a fast-paced world and an exciting time to be alive, but we need to work with what we've got. Our current game plan will leave a vast segment of the population unemployed and disenfranchised. This is a problem that money alone will never solve.