The Right Way to Bail Out The Economy

"Let's do some figurin' on the back of this envelope: We have $700 billion to work with:

Health coverage for every child in America would cost between $8 and $10 billion. (Frame of reference point: we have been spending over $10 billion A MONTH killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan so $9 billion a YEAR to keep people alive here seems pretty reasonable, huh?)

Health coverage for the 47 million uninsured Americans would cost between $50- and $100 billion.

That still leaves us with between $600-$650 billion to spend on federal, state and local jobs programs, fixing and modernizing America's crumbling bridges, roads, schools, air traffic control system, fiber optic networks, sewage and water systems, that kind of stuff.

Hiring all the millions of engineers, high tech and construction workers required to accomplish such a monumental task would drop the unemployment rate like a rock. And those good construction wages would fatten the balance sheets of now-troubled banks, which would revitalize home mortgage and small business lending.

It's called “trickle up economics” and, unlike trickle down economics, it actually works."