« What's he building in there? Let's go look it up online | Main | Too clean for your own good »
January 12, 2007
Jobs for Iraqis
Back in July I discussed a new plan to employ Afghans to discourage them from picking up arms. In today's WSJ, Giuliani and Gingrich are calling for a similar plan for Iraq. They are proposing using an annual wage of the "pre-war median annual income equivalent to $700". That strikes me as dangerous, because given the current economic calamity that's a good wage, maybe too good. It could attract the very people that are already employed, harming the floundering economic efforts of a post-Saddam economy. Better to make it less than the median wage, but not so much less that it attracts no takers. I hope if they do a policy like this, it includes relocation. They should target families with unemployed young men living in Baghdad, and then move them out to rural factories. That does several important things. It keeps people out of the resistance, it moves them out of harms way (between 50 and 73 percent of deaths are in Baghdad), it gives their life some purpose, it acts as a relatively incorrupting method of distributing aid, and maybe even helps the economy a bit.
Posted by OneEyedMan at January 12, 2007 1:35 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)