Roads to Recovery, and Republicans Who Block Them

[babylonsister]

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/77481/the-road-recovery-and-gop-roadblocks


Roads to Recovery, and Republicans Who Block Them
Jonathan Cohn


President Obama on Monday unveiled a new proposal for improving the nation’s transportation infrastructure--or, as the White House likes to say, the nation’s “roads, railways, and runways.”

Actually, it’s not entirely a new idea. Obama has been talking about this since the campaign. And while Obama is now proposing to ramp up infrastructure spending quickly, in order to boost the (very) weak economic recovery, the sum probably won’t make a huge difference in employment. Economist and blogger Brad Delong figures that if the proposal were to become law soon (a big assumption) and inject $50 billion of public works spending in the first year (also a big assumption), it would reduce unemployment by a modest 0.3 percentage points.

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And what do the Republicans have to say about this idea?

House Minority Leader John Boehner dismissed the proposal as “more of the same failed ‘stimulus’ spending,” saying that “If we’ve learned anything from the past 18 months, it’s that we can’t spend our way to prosperity.”

For what it’s worth, most economists believe the stimulus did create jobs, if not enough to offset job losses from the financial crisis and recession. Models that the Congressional Budget Office and other top economists use suggest infrastructure spending is among the most economically efficient ways to create jobs; a mountain of evidence suggests our transportation infrastructure is in desperate need of repair.

There are also enough tax loopholes to cover the full cost of the program and, by the way, this proposal could reduce the incidence of earmark spending--something, as it happens, that most Republicans in Congress say they oppose.

Sadly, the chances that Boehner and allies would debate this idea seriously were about the same that they would vote for it: Zero.