May 29, 2003
Promises, Promises
In addition to the 1.4 million new jobs that we are promised by the admininistration by the end of 2004 there is another promise that we should hold his feet to the fire on. An unhappy Peace Tree Farm points us to this Seattle Times article which notes that on September 13, 2000 candidate Bush " vowed to eliminate a $4.9 billion backlog in deferred maintenance" on our national parks. The backlog is up to $6 billion now. Completing this deferred maintenance over the next 18 months would be a nice small step toward all those new jobs. Failure to do so becomes one more lie to add to the list.
Posted by Steve on May 29, 2003Aha! That connection between the maintenance backlog and creating jobs is one I hadn't made when I posted the Seattle Times story about the National Park Service.
Of course, this president even refuses to acknowledge that corporations are more likely to create jobs by retaining investment capital than by handing it out to the ultra-rich in the form of low-tax dividends (a really important, but widely ignored, point made in Buffett's WaPo op-ed of last week). So he's certainly not about to start a WPA to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure.
Posted by N in Seattle at May 30, 2003 12:50 AM
