Kastama responds to Sunday column: The road to recovery will be long

OLYMPIA — Sen. Jim Kastama, D-Puyallup, took exception to a portion of Sunday’s column regarding the pace of legislative action on addressing the state’s budget crisis. He offered an op-ed column, which didn’t fit the editorial page’s guidelines, and will be trimmed down to a letter.

But since this started in Spin Control, we’re  happy to run the op-ed column in full, without comment. It starts here, and jumps inside the blog:

Economic recovery needs more than a quick fix

 By Sen. Jim Kastama

 A recent column by Jim Camden in the Spokesman-Review questioned the speed and scope of the Legislature’s efforts to create jobs. In particular, the piece quoted me as saying, “The recovery’s going to come one job at a time,” and characterized that viewpoint as inadequate because we lost so many jobs so quickly.

I’d like your readers to know why that perception misses the mark.

  We’re not going to bounce back from this recession by putting people back to work in the same jobs and fields from which they were laid off. Many of those jobs are gone forever, in industries that are or will soon be gone as well. Any hopes of a quick turnaround, however well-intended, are naïve.

  The media’s penchant for quick answers and fast results only exacerbates matters by pressuring lawmakers to rush to short-term solutions that sound good but accomplish little — and obscure the actual nature of the challenge before us.

  Our economic landscape is changing on a magnitude comparable to our country’s transformation from an agrarian economy to an industrial society at the turn of the 19th Century…