Originally, the "stimulus" (which was supposed to keep the official unemployment rate well below its current level) was supposed to be spent on infrastructure. The I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapse in Minnesota in 2007 and the DC Metro crash earlier this year in June (which was also covered by our own Roissy on his personal blog) showed that spending on maintaining current and building new infrastructure has been insufficient for a long time. The stimulus would have been a good opportunity to begin to correct this massive error as solid infrastructure is necessary for long term economic growth (not to mention safety), but womens' (such as NOW) groups objected. They called the original stimulus "burly", "macho", and "sexist" demanding that the stimulus be spent on women. This was despite the fact that millions of men were losing their jobs, and education and health care added jobs primarily benefiting women. NOW and the other womens' groups were successful with the stimulus was skewed towards education and health care leaving infrastructure in the same dangerous state it was before. In addition the gap between male and female unemployment is the largest in the history of unemployment data going back to 1948 when such data began.
This "women oriented stimulus" along with other things has caused the federal deficit for this year to surpass 1.8 trillion dollars, far beyond the deficit of any previous year. This causes more men to be unemployed since this massive federal debt is sucking capital out of the private sector which destroys jobs. Literally, there is no capital for new business creation and business expansion that would create jobs. Given all of the other factors here, effectively the stimulus and other ballooning government spending is causing millions and millions of more men to be unemployed. At least if the stimulus was spent on infrastructure jobs doing badly needed work would be created that would have provided a solid foundation for long term economic growth. Instead we have infrastructure that continues to crumble plus more and more men losing their jobs.
Since government policy is now driving the problems of male unemployment and crumbling infrastructure, only a significant change in government policy will solve these problems. Until then millions more men will become unemployed and there will be more bridges collapsing, metro crashes, electrical grid failures, and other disasters that should never have happened.
