In the wake of bin Laden’s death, political pressure is mounting for a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan. We were leaving anyway: Obama announced months ago that we are going to draw down force levels there, and we’re already in the process of bringing troops home from Iraq.
What happens when the troops come home? Unless the answer is “redeploy to Libya and Yemen,” we have to figure out how to find employment for tens of thousands of young men and women about to be mustered out of the military.
No one wants to say it, but the military is, for many, a steady job with good pay and benefits. If we keep underemployed troops in uniform after withdrawing them from Iraq and Afghanistan, the military will become a jobs program. Once that happens … if that happens … it won’t be long before people start screaming about bloated military pay and cushy benefits.
But if we do muster out huge numbers of troops, where will they find work? With the “official” unemployment rate at around 9%, the unofficial “real” unemployment rate double that, and new job creation in the shitter, drawing down military personnel levels will put a hell of a strain on the country. Nevertheless, it’s probably going to happen, and soon.
We need a jobs program. I don’t see any way around it. Not just to help employ troops transitioning to civilian life, but to help the civilians who are already out of work in this recession. Fortunately there’s a ton of work that needs to be done in this country, work that a civilian job corps would be perfectly suited for: rebuilding our transportation and power distribution infrastructure.
I’m willing to pay more taxes to help make it happen, but only if the wealthy and the corporations … especially those corporations that sent American jobs overseas … pay their share too.
Now that I’m through dreaming, it’s back to daily bloggage:
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I have a particular fondness for kid jokes. They always make me laugh. Do you know why you can’t hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the “p” is silent. Jokes like that. Here’s my latest fave:
What’s the difference between a weasel and a stoat? One is weaselly distinguished; the other’s stoatally different.
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Donna hosted her bridge club last night, so I cleared out. Spent an hour at Harbor Freight looking at motorcycle lifts, but couldn’t find one with a safety bar to lock the lift once it’s jacked up. Seems to me not having a safety bar is asking for trouble, and I’m surprised they sell them without such an obvious safety feature. For now my motorcycle will remain firmly on the ground.
At Barnes & Noble, where I spent the following hour, I wound up with two dog books. The first is titled Inside of a Dog, from the famous Groucho Marx line: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend — inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” It’s a nonfiction book about the inner lives of dogs. The second is Thereby Hangs a Tail, another Chet & Bernie mystery (Chet is a private eye’s dog; you can read a review of another Chet & Bernie mystery here).
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All my sisters have replaced their Facebook profile pictures with childhood photos that include our mother, who died far too soon. Not to be outdone, I found a photo of mom holding me as a robust infant:
Happy Mother’s Day, mom!
Actually, the military IS a jobs program, defined in economic terms as a way of reducing the potential work force in the private sector, used especially in times of high unemployment. In the UK, they call it “National Service” and I’ve long thought we should have it here. All we have to do is change the training a bit. Everyone should learn basic first aid, CPR, and the basics of unarmed self-defense. Then all we have to do is redirect the forces to the interior, as in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, community development and teaching (like, say, VISTA [NOT a Microsoft operating system]). Probably a smaller tax increase because we wouldn’t have to establish any new bureaucracies, just change the existing task list a bit. And include the Coast Guard as an alternative. After all, a country with two thousand-mile borders of ocean and five inland seas, to say nothing of the rivers, can use a lot of Coast Guarding and water rescues. See? Simple.