Since the last post, Obama's team has issued a report with more details on the stimulus package (http://otrans.3cdn.net/ee40602f9a7d8172b8_ozm6bt5oi.pdf).  Perhaps in response to the continuing bad news on the economic front, the report now estimates that the Obama plan will create three to four million new jobs by the end of 2010, an upward revision from earlier figures in the 2.6 million range.  This new report is brief, and filled with multiple caveats about the uncertainty of all economic projections.  So it is really better thought of as a feel-good tale than a serious attempt to address structural problems with our society -- complete with a nice graph that shows unemployment easing back down to a lovely 5% in 2013.  In a telling passage, the authors note that the vaunted job creation in infrastructure, education, health and energy will be concentrated in 2010 and 2011, because it takes so long to get spending programs created by legislation underway.  To counteract this delay, we can all just chill out in 2009, living off of our middle class tax cut and our bolstered state spending, two other facets of the recovery plan designed to "protect the most vulnerable" (it's a little surreal to see "Protecting Vulnerable" as a data element on an economic chart, but that's our current situation -- see p. 6).  

Again, the tenor of the overall scheme here is that we're just in a rough patch of economic bad luck.  We've just got some bad paper and bad apples in the system, in the form of non-performing sub-prime derivatives and unaccountable Wall Street crooks. Once we work that poisonous dreck out of the global economic innards, we should be all set.  Happy days will start rolling again.  Another telling  example of this delusional thinking, from the report, is that the authors predict that 30% of new job creation will be in the construction and manufacturing sectors, a fantastic side-effect of which will be that these jobs will be unionized and thus high-paying.  But what would shield these two areas, in the future, from the systemic flaws that have tanked them in the past?  Why would manufacturing jobs created by the stimulus package not just be bled away to lower-wage countries or downsized via technological advances all over again?  And as for these alluring infrastructure construction jobs, what exactly will they be building?  I know there's a lot of talk about us fixing our roads, bridges and schools, which are decaying rapidly.  And that's fine.  But a wider view of the "housing bubble" is that we have drastically overbuilt the vast suburban sprawl system already.  For the last few decades, our entire economy has been too self-referential: we coiled our society around building houses, linking them together, sticking strip malls along the links, and filling the houses with the crap from those strips.  The entire thing was like a snake eating itself by the tail.  Once we filled up all our spaces with houses and malls and such, and once the houses were all filled with crap, there was nothing left to do.  That is what compelled the corporate and financial systems to create the wide swaths of available home equity money.  The exhausted consumer classes could use their homes as ATMs, keeping the whole sprawl-building, house-filling ponzi scheme afloat.  So we essentially have our entire country overstuffed with too many homes, retail spaces, office parks, and other appendages to the consumption-centered life.  And as Peak Oil rears its ugly head in the years ahead (and it will -- don't be fooled by the temporary low price of oil), all the stimulus-created infrastructure jobs and improvements in the world will not hold up a physically unsustainable system.   

So while the stimulus plan seems sensible and necessary, as it is currently configured it rests on the dangerous illusion that the guts of the current system are essentially fine: the free market, the American Dream of the single-family home, the desirability of full-employment, and the uber-goal of economic growth.  Those are all still good.  The problems are just in the quality of the building blocks (education, infrastructure) and the seriousness of the elite managers (government oversight and regulation).  Once we get these secondary features fixed and operable again, the power and goodness of the system's guts will start working their alchemal magic.  And with Obama and his team at the helm, America 3.0 will be rich but green, dynamic but fair, and creative but efficient.  A nice picture, but as fantastical as Van Gogh's "Starry Night." 

But then again, it would be profoundly unfair to expect any new administration to do anything but what Obama's team is doing.  They have to think first of jobs, money, food stamps, staving off state bankruptcies, and the like.  Changing the underlying social form of the entire society is a bit outside the job description of a politician, no matter how talented he might be.  Moving away from the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form will certainly require some measure of federal leadership, but the heavy lifting on such social changes will have to be done by groups of regular people on the ground, living in new arrangements -- in new forms of "we." 

Next time, we'll get around to looking at the candidates for new collective social forms, and what the federal government might do to help sponsor such endeavors.