What Our Economy Needs

I've been reading about the Senate's version of the bailout, which i guess is going to be voted upon today. One GOOD PIECE, by DDAY over at Hullabaloo, makes a great case for how out of whack our economy is. Unless we have a balanced economy, with a healthy manufacturing sector to counteract the paper-pushing sector, we will remain out of whack, as DDAY notes in his criticism of the bill up today in the Senate:

"As for the "progressive alternative" from Rep. DeFazio, it doesn't read to me as much of an alternative at all. The good part of it, raising the FDIC insurance limit, is in the Senate plan now, and the rest of it seems to just be a new way to give away money. The change away from mark-to-market accounting, which has the potential to be hideous as companies make up numbers and the entire financial services industry becomes Enronized, is a fait accompli thanks to the SEC. David Sirota seems to like it, but I fail to see how it would do anything to stop foreclosures or alleviate the housing crisis. It may, I repeat may, save money on the initial layout, as there's no price tag attached. If it's administered the way that they fixed the S&L's, it could be cheap. But it doesn't even begin to try and solve the problem.

The problem, folks, is that the largest sector of the private economy is financial services, in other words people pushing paper to other people, while manufacturing is at its lowest level in decades. That is historically unsustainable and impossible, and invites crises like this, and no amount of figuring out a creative accounting fix and some kind of bailout on the cheap is going to change that. Only by creating a new energy economy, allowing for 5 million new green-collar jobs, and building a manufacturing base again to match the knowledge economy will we ever have an economic system in any kind of balance. Yet only the Senate bribery bill even brooches that subject."

Anyhow, i agree with DDAY that we ought to pass a stopgap that stops the hemorrhaging, but waits for a real fix until after the election and a new President and a new Congress can take it up. We've got to stop being the world's military force (DDAY calls us GLOBOCOP which is perfect), we've got to solve our energy dilemma, and we have got to stop allowing our financial sector to continue to kill the manufacturing sector.