Proposal for unemployed Americans

To the editor:

I have a question for  all the right wingers who claim to be Christians. The question is, What would you have people who have run out of options do other than robbing a convenience store to keep food on their table? Seems that you are perfectly willing to have them go to prison, at a cost of about $50,000 a year but are opposed to doing things like extending unemployment payments, which in Ohio would amount to under $11,000 a year. 

You also, given no viable alternative proposals that I recall, don't seem to have a problem with having unemployed people living on the streets and Dumpster diving for food. The right wing mantra has been that they could get jobs if the wanted to, right? Is that the case for the hundreds of thousands if not millions, including thousands of laid-off DHL workers, who can't make their mortgage payments because they have lost their jobs and can't find another? Is that the case for the estimated 27% of the homeless who are children? What would you have them do? While you check right wing talking points to cobble together what you will probably try to pass off as a plan, let me tell you about mine.

I want to give people willing and able to work the option of being gainfully employed, which is something corporate American has been too busy exporting jobs to do, by having we the people employ them until other options are available and I'm not proposing make work jobs. Faced with the need to conserve energy, to lower greenhouse gas emissions, to repair and maintain a crumbling infrastructure and to end our dependence on imported goods that is bankrupting our country you can't convince me that there can not be enough meaningful employment to allow the unemployed and underemployed masses to be gainfully employed in what I am calling a PEP (People Employing People) program. Locally based Aquaculture companies alone would economically produce fresh food and would probably employ hundreds of thousands of people and buildings required to set them up, such as those at the Wilmington Air Park are setting idle all over the country. 

I propose that, instead of more bailouts of banks and insurance companies, that the United States government use the money it keeps borrowing from future generations to fund startups of green energy companies that agree to hire only unemployed people until their low or even no interest loans are paid off. Furthermore, I propose that, until the loans are paid off, employees of these companies be covered by Medicare so as to allow the companies to compete with companies in countries with single payer health insurance systems. In one fell swoop a PEP program would put unemployed Americans back to work and provide them with health insurance they lost along with their jobs and that might leave future generations with a viable country. I know that having Americans make products, such as wind turbines to generate electricity, instead of having them made in China is a radical idea but it is an idea whose time is long past due coming.

Instead of the usual right wing attacks on a plan that you will probably brand as socialism (if not communism) or the usual platitudes such as getting government off businesses' backs so they can create jobs or implementing a flat tax so the obscenely rich will have more money to trickle down to the masses, let's hear a specific original plan to put Americans back to work and provide them health care. 

Sincerely,

Charles Leach

Lynchburg