Many Desperations Pile Up, 5 More Ways The Senate Could Have Helped

Wage theft has become more common in the downturn, the best the country's top economic policy makers can say about the job situation is that they don't "expect substantial further declines in unemployment this year," and former labor secretary Robert Reich explains that signs of recovery are greatly exaggerated. Cheery.

So it's good news that the Senate passed a jobs bill that will focus on small business employment tax cuts, as well as funding $20 billion worth of road and bridge construction.

But there are so many immediate needs, jobs that need doing and people who could do them, that the government could put a lot more people to work very quickly, and should. Because when families are slowly falling out of the middle class or into abject poverty, it's usually a death of a thousand cuts, it's usually a depletion of resources across their networks of family and friends until no one can afford to help anyone else.

- The nation's water and sewer systems need at least $50 billion worth of repairs over the next 10 years, though more like $330 billion to upgrade antiquated pipes and ducts that may be more than a century old. Broken water and sewer mains are causing property damage and loss of service already, and I shouldn't have to spell out how disruptive this could be.

- Now that the snow is thawing and the ice is melting, it's flood season in the Midwest again. While it's great that people are willing to volunteer at sandbagging, permanent wetland restoration and greenbelt planting along waterways would do a great deal to directly absorb flood waters and reduce surface runoff, as well as limit erosion that fills in river bottoms making them more shallow.

- In states all across the country, budget cuts mean 3,600 additional public transit workers will be laid off this year, with service cuts and fare increases expected in many highly transit-dependent metropolitan areas. New Jersey transit alone will lose $32 million in state funding. Cutting transit access will reduce commuting access for low income households, reduce mobility for the disabled and elderly, and increase household expenses when workers are seeing cuts in their take home pay. The federal government alone has the financial muscle to fully fund the transit systems so many Americans depend on every day for their livelihoods.

- States are also strapped to fund home care for the elderly, even though it costs several times less to keep seniors living comfortably in their own homes than it does to move them to assisted living facilities. Paying for good care at home could save the country money while creating more jobs for health care workers. Not least, 80 percent of seniors prefer staying in their own homes to moving into assisted living or nursing homes, which would make an expansion of home care a win on the humanitarian front as well as the economic front.

- Planning to meet new power generation needs with renewable energy could create many thousands of short term installation jobs and long term manufacturing jobs, as well as grow a whole new industry with the potential to create more jobs over many years, as we have discussed on these pages previously.

Supporting more funding for any of these priorities in a jobs bill would not only have created more work in communities across the nation, they would have helped meet multiple worthwhile goals, they would have made many lives a little easier. They could still go back and try again, too.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future