We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s tragic.

Ms. DeLauro’s bill has an unusual range of support, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Service Employees International Union. One of her co- sponsors is Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who noted that his hometown, Minneapolis, is where the I-35W bridge collapsed in 2007, hurling cars, trucks and vans into the Mississippi River and killing 13 people.

The infrastructure bank would be authorized to issue bonds, provide loans and offer loan guarantees to finance large-scale projects. The idea would be to leverage substantial amounts of private capital in support of such projects, and to make more prudent decisions about which projects move ahead.

For those who are concerned about whether the government can afford these major projects, I would note that one of the biggest supporters of the creation of an infrastructure bank is Felix Rohatyn, the financier who guided New York City through the harrowing fiscal crisis of the 1970s. He is hardly a radical when it comes to government finances.

The link between the need to rebuild the nation’s crumbing infrastructure and the crucial need to find rich new sources of employment in this economic downturn should be obvious, a no-brainer. The Center for Labor Market Studies is at Northeastern University in Boston. A memo that I received a few days ago from the center’s director, Andrew Sum, notes that “no immediate recovery of jobs” is anticipated, even if the recession officially ends, as some have projected, by next fall.

The memo said: “Since unemployment cannot begin to fall until payroll growth hits about one percent  and payroll growth will not hit one percent until [gross domestic product] growth hits at least 2.5 percent to 3 percent  we may not see any substantive payroll growth until late 2010 or 2011, and unemployment could rise until that time.”

We’ve already lost nearly 5.7 million jobs in this recession. Those losses, the center says, “have been overwhelmingly concentrated among male workers, especially among men under 35.”

If the U.S. is to have any hope of getting its economic act together over the next few years, there will have to be a much greater focus on putting people back to work. Rebuilding the infrastructure is the place to start.