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The Great Infrastructure Initiative Canard
Jan 1st, 2009 | 2 responses
We’ve all been hearing a lot about in-coming President Obama’s plan to dramatically improve this nation’s infrastructure with a huge new federal spending initiative—one akin to the way our national infrastructure was improved in the 1950s by the interstate highway building program. Sound great? Well, maybe not so great.
Infrastructure improvements in this country historically have been paid for by state and local governments. A great many of these entities, however, have hit a fiscal wall of late, and can’t borrow the money they need to fund such projects. A major new federal infrastructure effort would thus not be over-and-above what has already planned. It would simply replace what would have been done anyway had a nasty recession not come along.
It’s good that what would have been done might get done after all. And that jobs that would have been paid for by local governments might still exist. But big new infrastructure initiatives? No.
Maybe we won’t fall further into a national infrastructure black hole. But neither will that hole be filled in any time soon.
2 Responses to “The Great Infrastructure Initiative Canard”
No, there are also projects that even without the recession were having problems being funded, projects that are all planned out but had been delayed due to lack of funds and repairs that just need to be done.
Michael, we have an estimated $1.5 trillion backlog in infrastructure maintenance. Sure it “would have been done” anyway (eventually, like fixing those levees or that bridge?). That's been the empty promise to our kids for 30 years, during which things have continued to decline while we had our little “free market” love fest of outsourcing everything to slave labor countries, building THEIR infrastructures (China builds the equivalent of a Houston a month).
So-called conservatives still rail that American workers and especially *gasp* unions, should take the hit and “be competitive” (with $8/day Chinese laborers? Really?) Meanwhile, our private sector is still falling, with massive failures in retail now expected after the worst Christmas in 40 years.
So. There are no jobs, no credit, and work to be done. Instead of pulling together, let's blast Obama for trying to make lemonade out of the lemons the free marketeers have delivered to us and our kids.
BTW, many infrastructure projects are federally funded, and in fact, many state and local projects are federally funded. One of the criticisms of all the bailouts is that it takes too much time for the money to start flowing (it sure isn't flowing from the banks we bailed out).
These infrastructure projects are planned, contractors are known, bids have been in for years, and they can start Monday, putting average Americans to work NOW, so they have money to spend in a classic trickle-UP rescue scenario. Time to stop pretending that shoveling money into the pockets of the already wealthy is going to save us. That failed. Get over it.