huge sums of $$$$ wasted on infrastructure projects: NY Times:

[amborin]

Needs Obama's line by line scrutiny:

<snip>

"....when it comes to the nation’s infrastructure, money isn’t the main problem.
A lack of adequate financing is part of the problem, without doubt. But the bigger problem has been an utter lack of seriousness in deciding how that money gets spent. And as long as we’re going to stimulate the economy by spending money on roads, bridges and the like, we may as well do it right.

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

There are monuments to the resulting waste all over the country: the little-traveled Bud Shuster Highway in western Pennsylvania; new highways in suburban St. Louis and suburban Maryland that won’t alleviate traffic; all the fancy government-subsidized sports stadiums that have replaced perfectly good existing stadiums. These are the Bridges to (Almost) Nowhere that actually got built.
They help explain why our infrastructure is in such poor shape even though spending on it, surprisingly enough, has risen at a good clip in recent decades. Spending is up 50 percent over the last 10 years, after adjusting for inflation. As a share of the economy, it will be higher this year than in any year since 1981."

<snip>

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/business/economy/19leonhardt.html?scp=4&sq=infrastructure%20spending&st=cse>

[IndyOp]

1. Where to start: Repair what is there! Overpasses, bridges, roads...

Repairing what we already have provides more jobs than building new -- the people who benefit from those projects are engineers and construction conglomerates.