What’s the price tag on self-worth?

People need jobs.

This country needs to get back to work.

I don’t care what the rhetoric is. I don’t care if Obama is babbling adjectives or Boehner is brimming with tears.

Take a drive around town.

Strip malls are scarred by vacancies. Empty storefronts pop up like kids in costumes on Halloween night. It is downright frightful.

That does not even take into account the urban landscape of places like Detroit, Pontiac and Flint.

We’ve turned our back on the cities and we should be ashamed.

Factories have closed. Well-paying blue collar jobs are largely non-existent. Even the bosses who wear white collar Izod shirts are only playing a couple of rounds of golf a week at the country club.

Some aren't playing golf at all.

How quickly people forget.

People in other parts of the country call Detroit appalling. Well, they were not appalled by the city during World War II. Then, Detroit was known as the “arsenal of democracy.”

Three months before Germany surrendered, Josef Stalin told Franklin D. Roosevelt that “Detroit is winning the war.”

The Big Three -- GM, Chrysler and Ford – had converted their assembly lines to crank out tanks, planes, trucks and other weapons.

Another war is raging and I don’t mean one fought with bombs and bullets. It is an economic battleground and we are not winning that war.

Work is being outsourced. Jobs are being sent overseas. We used to build cars. Now we wait tables or pour drinks.

America needs to get back to work. We need to create quality jobs here. I don’t know what the cost will be, but a feeling of self-worth is invaluable.