How do we get out of this economic mess?

Forget the short term. No matter what you might hear from elected officials - local, state, and federal - or from Wall Street protesters, you can't suddenly turn on the job spigot, even if the politics allowed it (and the failure Obama's jobs bill this week affirms that it won't). A more sensible approach is to look longer term, as the New America Foundation has done in a provocative white paper. Here are the three major ideas:

--A $1.2 trillion, public investment program that repairs the nation's crumbling public infrastructure and, in so doing puts people back to work. With interest rates so low and production levels well below capacity, the timing couldn't be better.

--A debt restructuring program that addresses the banking and real estate sectors in particular.

--Global reforms that can help deal with debt problems in the U.S. and Europe, as well as the growth of emerging market economies.

The report's authors, who do an admirable job reviewing the many missteps leading up to the recession and nascent recovery, conclude that the remedies being attempted are insufficient or even misguided. This time really is different. From the report:

Regrettably, in our view, there seems to be a pronounced tendency on the part of most policymakers worldwide to view the current situation as, substantially, no more than an extreme business cyclical decline. From such declines, of course, robust cyclical recoveries can reasonably be anticipated to follow in relatively short order, as previous excesses are worked off and supply and demand find their way back into balance. And such expectations, in turn, tend to be viewed as justifying merely modest policy measures.

[CUT]

Current economic conditions call for a much different kind of recovery program than those proposed or attempted thus far -- one that is more sustained, more substantial, more concentrated, and more strategically aimed at creating new sources of growth. That was what we did as a nation during the sole precedent to the present period - the debt-deflation years of the 1930s. Rather than lurching from one futile mini-stimulus and quantitative easing to another, we must build consensus around a five-to-seven-year plan that matches the likely duration of the de-levering with which we now live, as well as that of the time it will take for emerging markets to transition to patterns of economic growth driven by domestic demand rather than exports.

This is a very impressive report - thoughtful, dispassionate, and informative. But the politics required in getting these ideas realized is problematic at best (if you have any doubts, check out last night's Republican debate). Basically, you're asking a society that's dominated by short-term thinking to look beyond the next election cycle or the next quarterly report. I just don't know how you do that.