President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC 20500
September 6, 2011
President Obama,
At the time of this writing it’s the day after Labor Day. You’ve just given a speech in Detroit in which you proposed giving a million construction workers jobs to build bridges, repair highways and perform other much-needed maintenance and upgrades to the nation’s transportation infrastructure. This Thursday you’re scheduled to give a speech to a joint session of Congress, or at least the members with respect for your office, where you’re likely to also propose building and repairing schools and all manner of other extremely beneficial public works projects to put people to work.
This is all great. I support this. Construction was flooded with people during the housing boom and now they’re all out of work, which is a major chunk of unemployment and a huge hindrance to economic recovery. If we can get some better schools out of the deal all the better. You’ve gotta spend money to make money, as they say, and just like a mom and pop store taking out a small business loan to expand we need to put money into the economy to grow it.
That said, there’s a huge segment of the population you’re ignoring: Twenty-somethings who, due to economic factors, are unable to get a toe hold in a career-track job, unable to adequately support themselves and, ultimately, unable to truly graduate to adulthood. This economy is in the process of creating a lost generation and, rather than stopping it, this nation has decided to collectively blame that very generation and make the problem worse.
In addition to any other jobs plans, this must be addressed.
In Defense of the Media
The Occupy Wall Street manifesto and recent round of arrests have sparked more bashing of the “media” by not just the usual suspects but people I generally respect. Considering they’re presumably including me in that statement, lumping me with all sorts of people who give us as a whole a bad name, I can’t help but reply.
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