Valerie Jarrett Quotes
There are certain things that Americans expect their government to do. Our infrastructure is vitally important. Putting people back to work with construction is important. Our roads, our bridges, our sewers, our waterways, our dams - this is what makes our country so special.
Jarrett, Valerie. Interview. MSNBC, 9 Sept. 2011.
This was the first time that the Environmental Protection Agency had vetoed a permit for a mountain top removal coal mining project that had been granted by the Army Corps of Engineers. The proposed project, Spruce 1, would have removed the entire top of a mountain. It would have created a number of jobs, but it also would have polluted a number of streams in the area and would have affected the ground water of people in the area. What made this a most difficult political decision was that the economic damage was clear as was the science showing the water damage. The people in the community were split over which was the worse alternative.
Even today, there are thousands of infrastructure improvements and beautifications that were made by people working for the government when there were no private jobs available, that we can view and use from the Great Depression programs of the New Deal.
It is actually true that public works do create indirect jobs, however the efficiency of indirect job creation is not very good. If the government spends $100 on a public works project half might go to construction materials and the rest pays the salary of construction workers. Part of the materials purchase pay the salaries of workers in the supply chain. And most of the salary gets spent on goods and services which helps to pay other workers and thus jobs are created when there is a public works construction project. However the reason FDR did not want this fact to be publicized is because the economic relationships to indirect jobs is counterintuitive. Many people hearing that public works construction also produces jobs say “Well then let us fund many more government public works programs and create even more jobs—keep spending on projects until there is no more unemployment.” However that is not a sustainable strategy. There is enough benefit in the direct jobs and the use of the public improvement, that it was, in FDR’s view, sufficient without “selling” the indirect job creation picture.
Valerie June Jarrett (née Bowman; born November 14, 1956) is an American businesswoman and former government official. She served as the senior advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama and assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs from 2009 to 2017. Before that, she served as a co-chair of the Obama–Biden Transition Project.
