Economic Recovery dollars without paradigm shift is wasted

The government is attempting to regenerate and recover the economy through the expenditure of billions of dollars on infrastructure and other community improvement projects. Typical of the need for a paradigm shift in the method and strategy by which such funds are expended is the recent proposed $21 million-interchange at Liberty Road/I-695 in the Randallstown area of Maryland. The current method is to focus on the building of the interchange as opposed to the economic empowerment to the community that could be embodied in the funds being spent.
It is commonly agreed that economic recovery and jobs depend very much upon the viability of small businesses at the community level. Yet there is a disconnect between this fundamental idea and the method by which government programs operate.

Specifically, through the screens and hurdles of qualifications, licensing, rules, regulations, guidelines for bonding, corporate capability, government delays and red tape, little of the money spent filters down to the small businesses that would multiply jobs and re-circulate capital in local communities.

Similarly, many years of government expenditure of perhaps trillions of dollars to recover blighted and impoverished inner city neighborhoods have yielded exactly the opposite outcomes: joblessness and economic despair continue in a downward spiral for the persons indigenous to the inner city.

These outcomes can no longer be funded and tolerated economically. Without more empowering results from government expenditures, we are doomed to intransigent and long-term deficits without the results of generating new economies.

In this context, the economic blight of local neighborhoods will spread even as government deficits rise allegedly to empower and support impoverished communities.

We can no longer afford this kind of result.