Can our economy recover without a real jobs creation program?

Two and a half years later, the pundits might be starting to catch up with your humble blogger.

This week, Time magazine explores the possibility of creating a WPA-type jobs program to put people back to work. The WPA - the Works Progress Administration - was a New Deal program that employed 8.5 million people at a cost of $11 billion. It put people back to work, put food on the table and kept people in their homes during the Great Depression.

But wait, you say. Unemployment was really, really high back during the Depression, on the order of 25%. Well, unemployment in Imperial County here in California is above 27% already. If you include all the people who have given up looking for work or who are working part-time when they want to work full time, rates in many states like Michigan and Oregon are above 20%.

Back in April 2007 I wrote a post on this blog titled It's time for a new New Deal. The jobs problem was already clear back then to many of us in workforce development. It took an almost complete economic collapse for the rest of the country to experience what had been happening in low income and disadvantaged communities. For the middle class to find out they can't leverage their future on cheap credit forever.

I argued then - and still do today - we need a jobs program that focuses on the industries where we have the greatest need to rebuild. Health care and education are both fraying at the edges, so they're at the top of my list. The Obama administration has made green jobs hip and sexy, so let's have them too. Jobs rebuilding the infrastructure that is crumbling beneath our feet as a result of disinvestment have to be a priority.

Even the narrow minded taxes-are-always-bad crusaders are starting to argue that we can't rebuild our economy without investing in jobs. They're wrong when they argue that tax cuts will magically create jobs, but they're right that creating jobs and preparing workers for those jobs is absolutely necessary.

Way back in November when the president-elect's team started talking about a stimulus plan, I was optimistic their investments would create the jobs we need to recover.

They haven't done that yet, but there's still time for lawmakers to reconsider whether it makes more sense to pay the the salaries of Wall Street executives or the wages of the people who teach our children, care for us when we are ill, and build the roads we drive every day.