Obama's Eisenhower Plan

During Saturday's radio address President Elect Obama said that he would make the largest investment in the infrastructure of the Nation since the Eisenhower Administration when he invested in the National Highway System. That is certainly a laudable goal that needs to be put in place after eight years of neglected infrastructure maintenance and improvements by the Republican Bush Administration., but immediate assistance is needed by the Nation's retailers and family owned businesses that currently provide the bulk of American jobs.

The focus has been on the Financial Industry, and then was shifted to the Auto Industry, but the bulk of jobs created in this Country are created and maintained by the small businesses that line the streets of Main Street and populate the strip malls and malls of the Nation. The neighborhood florist is not a corporate chain but rather 26, 000 independent family businesses that employ approximately at least 156,000 Americans. 57,000 pizzerias spread throughout the country are by and large family owned and operated each employing at a minimum of 3 people each. There are family owned liquor stores and grocery stores all employing people., but the Congress and the Federal Government have focused on the Banking Industry were not exactly blameless in creating the current economic condition. Although the Banking Industry employs a lot of people they do not employ the numbers that all the family owned businesses together employ. These businesses are suffering drastically by the current economic depression, yet, there is no help talked about or implemented for them. In a matter of months these local stores will begin closing in mass, leaving hundreds of thousands more Americans without jobs and leaving those who live in neighborhoods without convenient local sources of services and goods. Some one in Congress must wake up and propose immediate assistance to the local business that is the backbone of America.

Unlike the financial industry and the auto industry, the family owned business is not looking for direct assistance or a bail out, they are just looking for the Federal Government to provide a reasonable stimulus check to each and every American that will enable them to have spendable currency that will be spent at the neighborhood businesses and enable them to survive. If help is not forth coming in the next 30-60 days there will be massive store closures that will devastate neighborhoods and sink this Nation ever deeper into an economic depression that no government program short of the government employing most of the work force will be able to correct.