It could yet be watered down, but so far it sounds good …
President-elect Barack Obama committed Saturday to the largest public works construction program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half-century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.
Later in the same article, more evidence that wingnutism is a mental pathology –
Alan D. Viard, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, told Congress recently that public works spending should not be authorized out of “the illusory hope of job gains or economic stabilization.”
“If more money is spent on infrastructure, more workers will be employed in that sector,” Mr. Viard told the House Ways and Means Committee. “In the long run, however, an increase in infrastructure spending requires a reduction in public or private spending for other goods and services. As a result, fewer workers are employed in other sectors of the economy.”
Not having enough workers to go around doesn’t seem to be an issue at the moment.
I’m hoping that the AEI will be as welcome as a pork loin at a barmitzva in the Obama administration. The AEI is a bunch of neo-con jerkwads.
Mr Viard’s comments sound like stuff coming out of the mouth of a 2nd grader. I mean, if people are deployed to one sector they aren’t working in another – pretty obvious. What wingnuts can never see is the future. Infrastructure is not an end in itself, it’s a means to other ends. Wingnuts can never see this.
…we can always count on neo-con wingnuts like Viard to crawl out from under the various piles of smoking debris created by adherence to the twisted version of ‘free market capitalism’ that they have been beating the drums for over the last couple of decades to insist that we should listen to them one more time. Viard wants to play the “small government/balanced budget” game, refusing to acknowledge that – in the depths of the sort of economic crisis that we find ourselves – it isn’t a zero-sum game. Any economist worth his or her salt (in other words, one who doesn’t work for AEI) discounts any meaningful discussion about the deficit or budgetary tradeoffs in times like these….
Bush and the other GOP slime buckets are concerned that Obama’s proposal will leave a financial burden for future generations..Huh?
Bush blew through close to a trillion dollars in Iraq, and it’s all on the cuff. Now he’s suddenly concerned for who is going to pick up the tab? One thing about Obama’s proposal is that it will be tangible and positive( implemented in truth), as opposed to Bush’s horrendous government spending on destructive fantasies that destroyed million of lives.
Hey, I wouldn’t be adverse to shifting some of those defense spending dollars into a segment of the economy that would return a positive and constructive benefit. Our current military spending borders on insanity, and is way out of balance to the needs of reality.
I’ve seen rough tabulations of the tax dollars Bush wasted in Iraq, after Katrina, and just generally, via eight years of unfulfilled contracts to cronies, bricks of cash shipped overseas and stolen, and so on. The sums are nauseating.
Problem is, it will cost plenty to clean up a mess of such terrible proportions. There’s no way to avoid it, other than to keep on wallowing in our own swill until we drown. To the frat boys of the AEI, that might sound like a typical Sunday morning, but it’s not an option for Americans who have children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren whom they love.
So let the rich, lazy frat boys stay passed out moaning in their bunks, while the rest of us get on with it. We can clean out their pockets later; after all, if they want to call themselves Americans, they have to contribute something.
But, but, the whole point of the massive infrastructure spending plan is that currently ISN’T enough private spending for other goods and services for that to be a concern. It’s not that the infrastructure program requires a reduction in other spending, but that the collapse in the rest of the economy requires a government infrastructure spending program.
This is simple enough that even a 3rd grader could understand it. That Viard, who works at the AEI, apparently doesn’t must be yet another example of Upton Sinclair’s principle that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Meet The Press will have an interesting Obama announcement this morning…
Obama will be on MTP this morning and will name (this from HuffPo) “General Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Shinseki gained fame for losing his job in the Bush Administration after he testified to Congress that an occupation of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, a view which was not shared by the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, but is now widely regarded as correct.”
Under The LobsterScope
My question for the last 30 years:
Why do we Democrat’s alway have to suffer the hang-over’s without ever having any of the drink’s?
maha,
You closed an earlier post before I could add something else – and sometimes STUPID is THRUST upon us!
“As a result fewer workers are employed in other sectors of the economy.”
This is a minor variation in the wingnut narrative which refutes FDRs programs under the New Deal. Namely, (n the wingnut narative) the economy would have recovered faster without gov’t intervention which confused investors who held back and as a result prolonged the great depression. This is fertilizer.
The wingnuts will fight domestic jobs-oriented programs to the bitter end. And if they work to haul us out of this recession, they will deny that ‘socialistic’ programs were even indirectly the prescription for a cure.
Public works is an amorphous concept. Much depends on exactly what the spending is for: broadband, railroads, the power grid,the education system, hospitals, all of these are worthwhile. If the spending is just more pork, it is just going down the same black hole as the current programs.
I’m looking forward to Biden’s Vice Presidency.
It will be good to get back to a Vice President who is not in charge of running the government, especially the “secret” government. It will be good to have a Vice President who is not always located in an “Undisclosed Location.” And it will certainy be good to have a Vice President who knows he is part of the Executive Branch and that’s it.
To take the words directly from Joe Biden:
And, frankly, I’ll be glad to see Cheney sink back to his undisclosed location and never come out again.
Under The LobsterScope