COASTAL TOURISM: THE ECONOMIC ENGINE THAT CAN RESTART THE US ECONOMY

Here are some Cold Hard Facts, gathered from the book An Introduction to Coastal Zone Management, by Timothy Beatly,et. al., in fact everything garnered in this essay is a direct quote and is attributable to this text:

NO single agency at the federal level has the exclusive control over coastal management, and there is no single or unified coastal zone policy or strategy that guides or coordinates federal actions or programs. Thus, coastal zone management responsibilities are fragmented and dispersed at the federal level.

In this fragmented system, the programs and policies of different federal agencies often work at cross-purposes. For example FEMA provides disaster relief and flood insurance, and this promotes development in hazardous areas, thus working at cross-purposes with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management (OCRM).

Because some policies are designed to work in concert with other coastal management programs and authorities, and because these agencies are dispersed across different federal agencies, there is no unified national strategy for managing our national ecosystem and our coastal zones.

This fragmentation provides the federal government the opportunity to revamp and create a new system that reflects a strategic national policy for the management of the coastal zone, as one system.

The system's focus would then work in concert to create American jobs, boost our economy, and provide for the sustainable management of our coastal resources. The potential to kick start the economy with effective coastal zone management is tremendous because of these facts:

• Already MORE THAN HALF of the US Population reside along the coast and in coastal watersheds (Bookman et al.1999) 
• by 2015 US Coastal population will grow to 166 million
• The Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and Southeast coastal regions of the US are expected to experience the most population  and development growth
• Of the nation's 20 fastest growing counties, 17 are coastal
• 80 % of Californians and 60% of Floridians live  live within 10 miles of the Coast
• In 1960 62 people lived per coastal square mile by 2015 the population on the coast it is expected to rise to 327 people per square mile

These facts present clear demographics changes, challenges, and opportunity to assemble policy and to help jump start our economy. It also provides insight to direct political capital: political influence, and political stratagem, to direct and manage the most pressing challenge of our generation, the management of our coastal zones and communities. 

More importantly, it provides the administration and its leadership the opportunity to focus on two pronged (long and short term) strategy to jump start the economy with coastal management.

More Statistics on coastal use indicates the extent to which the US is using coastal areas for recreational purposes:

• Some 180 million Americans visit the coast every year

• National Park Service data suggests that visitation to national parks, national seashores, and national monuments have risen markedly.
• 77 million Americans engage in recreational boating

Coastal tourism is an economic engine now!

The Obama Administration and it's analyst have given a hard look at traditional sources and ways to invest in, in order to quickly jump start the economy, we need to look at a new paradigm for growth led by population trends and coastal zone use.

Limited resources, and the pressure of a possible doubling of our population by the year 2025 must force us to look at our coasts and the coastal pressures and its critical management issues as a means of investment to help jump start our economy, and move it into the 21st Century.

More Data Shows that:

• The American coastal zone remains the location of major cities and urban agglomerations
• 14 of the nation's 20 largest cities are located on the coastal zone
• Recent decades show that uses of coastline have shifted to include more recreational uses 
• Resource use of coastal zone remains significant in agriculture, fishing, oil, gas and minerals extraction

The big point is that:

COASTAL AREAS ARE ECONOMIC ENGINES, GENERATING SOME $54 BILLION IN GOODS AND SERVICES AND 28 MILLION JOBS.

All of this important to know when considering how to kick start the economy, but just as important are the pressures, problems and policy issues that go with population and development growth.

The substantial issues that arise from coastal population and development pressures also present long and short term opportunity for investment.

A consortium of public and private investment can helps us out of this economic and environmental hole we are in. The Army Corp of Engineers can create and developed major projects to energize the economy. Projects that involve coastal planning, and policy, mitigation and reinforcement, protection and conservation, energy development, and marine/fishery management, social equity and quality of life.

The Challenge is to Sustain the Coast, Spur the Economy, and Create Millions of American Jobs.

How we manage the following issues will be pivotal in forming a comprehensive approach to saving the American economy, and way of life.  All of the following issues can be can be addressed separately, but clearly they are interrelated and key to the well being of the nation.

• Coastal Storm Mitigation
• Shoreline Erosion and Sea Level Rise
• Strategic Retreat or Coastal Reinforcement
• Protection of Coastal Wetlands and Resource-lands
• Energy Development and the Coast
• Biodiversity and Habitat Conservation
• Marine and Fishery Management
• The Coast as a Recreational Commons: Protecting Access to Beaches and Shorelines
• Social Equity in Coastal Planning
• Coastal Sprawl, Land Use Pressures, and Quality of Life
• Private Property versus the Public Interest in Coastal Planning

Tackling these issues presents opportunity for creating millions of jobs across the board and across this nation, but more importantly it will keep the jobs from being outsourced, because these issues are exclusive to the coastal regions of the United States.

 

The solutions and benefits that come out of this will therefore promote local, regional, and national commerce and industry. The immediate and direct impact to the economy will be enormous. Not only will living wage jobs be created, but well paying jobs that will also affect the quality of American life now and the American Way of Life for many generations to come.

President Obama attack Bush's Public Sector Deficit ASAP

The US in the course of the eight years of the Bush Administration and the Republican led Congress has made us a debtor nation. I will say it again: The Bush-Republican led administration sold out our nation to foreign investors making us a debtor nation. Bush-Republican "Lone Ranger" approach left our nation "Tonto (silly)" in debt.

What is left of the economy the Bush Era Republican majority (now the minority) are slowly pivoting the responsibility of the economy onto the President Obama. The truth is the Republican's and Bush are solely responsible for the current crisis we face both militarily and economically.

The security question we should be asking is: "Are we as a nation more secure in light of the Bush/Republican economic sellout and economic catastrophe of 2008?" The answer in my mind is unequivocally, No! If military security hinges on our ability to raise, produce, and reconstitute our economy then the defense of our nation is treading on thin ice. All thanks to Bush-Republican sell out policies of their administration to fund an unwarranted war, and if the country does not rebound, then history will mark the Bush-Republican era, as a failure.

No matter where we are now or four years from now if our economy is not better by 2012 it certainly will not rest on the hands of President Obama. Realistically it took FDR three terms and the destruction of Europe to make our economy humm and grow. It took Clinton two terms to create record setting job growth, and economic solvency. It will take President Obama just as long.

It is completely the fault of Bush and his Republican co-horts, and if President Obama fails to revive the economy it will certainly not be because of his lack of effort, or the democrat lack of effort, but the blame will lie squarely on the shoulders of the party of NO, the GOP, the "GOPNO's," the people who at every turn said NO to President Obama.

Who wished his failure for their political gain. The "GOPNO's" will realize one thing that the tree will lay where it falls, and when it falls it will directly fall on them crushing them for being "DO-NOTHINGS" wishing our nation and our President's demise. The public will remember who never extended their hands, who never rolled up their sleeves, and provided the all important effort to join forces to pull our nation, out of the pit the GOP and President Bush has let it fall into.

Our stability has been squandered by unrestricted bloating of the public sector by Bush Republican's and by borrowing heavily or selling out America to foreign investors in China, and Europe. This borrowing has turned us into a debtor nation, inefficient, and unresponsive to the changing world environment and economy. Led by "lazy-faire"privileged pugilists who have fought, at every phase to strip every sense of equal opportunity and destroyed the highest possible value of American pride in the American Dream.

Because we have trillion dollar deficits with a capital "T," the emphasis of crisis is even more daunting and dramatic than a million or a billion dollar deficit, but the solution is the same. The Economic approach doesn't change, the basics of economic problem solving is essentially the same, and the mode attack towards large deficits is essentially the same as it was during the Clinton years or in FDR's era, only know the scale and enormity of the problem breaks new ground, because we are in the trillions, but nonetheless the sure footed principles of economics that pulled us out of the Great Depression, and Reagan's 1980's recession in the 1990's can pull us out now.

Relying on tested, tried, and true economic principles to attack the growing trillion dollar deficit will assuage the widespread anxiety the Republican's are trying to spread in sensationalistic attacks on our worst fear of economic insolvency.

So what can the past tell us about the future: Dr. Milton Freidman and Edward Nell, a Malcom B. Smith Professor of Economics, at the New School for Research in New York City wrote an article in 1994, published by the New York Review of Books titled: How Dangerous is the Deficit? An Exchange. Here both agreed on one thing:

PROFESSOR NELL WROTE:

Moreover, included in the US measure is the highest ratio of defense spending to GNP of any advanced nation. This means that excluding defense, we have by far the smallest public sector plus transfer system, in relation to GNP, in the developed world. Moreover our public sector has grown more slowly than that of any other developed nation. Could it be that many of our problems arise because our government is spending too little, in relation to GNP, rather than too much? Can we really manage the problems of a modern economy with less government participation than other nations require? Our social and economic statistics do not paint an encouraging picture.

These issues call for analysis and interpretation. Yet in public political discussion it is all too commonly assumed that government spending must be reduced further. However, recent studies have provided evidence that public investment in education, R&D and infrastructure will add more to future GNP than private spending, and further is likely to stimulate private productive investment. Far from trying to curb or cut government spending, the Clinton Administration needs to do just what Professor Friedman apparently fears—"…deliver…little if any deficit reduction, but instead [provide us with] a big increase in domestic spending, financed by a combination of new taxes and defense cuts…"

DR. FREIDMAN RESPONDED:

I supported President Clinton's deficit reduction package (indeed, I argued in these pages for a more aggressive program than the President's) not merely because I believe increased investment is essential to achieving productivity growth and with it a rising standard of living but also, and importantly, because I share the President's assessment that on average the US economy will be near to full employment during the period in question.

For example, I suggested in Day of Reckoning that President Reagan's tax cuts and greater military spending not only did not crowd out US private investment during the high-unemployment years of 1981–1984 but probably crowded in some investment by increasing overall economic activity and hence people's incomes and their demand for many products.

In the end, I was therefore pleased that Congress passed the President's program. No one likes paying higher taxes, of course, or doing without the programs curtailed by cuts in government spending. But I believe that reducing the government's borrowing, and so increasing our country's investment, is the surest way we know to begin to correct the dual problem of declining average living standards and widening inequalities about which I have previously written here.

The answer is... not to stop government spending but to stop government borrowing, and reign in the government bureaucracy, which the Bush-Republicans created. They sold out our nation, our nest egg's and our children inheritance to foreign banks and foreign countries, and placed our overall security on the most untenable ground ever.

What President Obama needs to do is stop government borrowing to attack the deficit, and pay off the foreign debt, ASAP. President Obama must continue his full court press and pass the twin reform of both the energy and health sectors and achieve the economies of scale and energy indepence that are so large a part of our present and future GNP. President Obama must continue to invest heavily, and even take a more aggressive approach to implementing the public investment in education, R&D and infrastructure that will add more to future GNP than private spending will ever accomplish on its own, and which is further likely to stimulate private productive investment well into our childrens future.