Archive for category PPC
Norman Corwin, RIP
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, Radio on October 23rd, 2011
On Wednesday, Norman Corwin died.
Most of you probably haven’t heard of him, but he was one of radio’s true poets. He shouldn’t just be in the Radio Hall of Fame, he should have written everything in it.
Corwin’s best work was somewhere between impressionistic and surrealistic, as in, “On a Note of Triumph,” or the more whimsical, “The Odyssey of Runyon Jones,” for Columbia Workshop. I remember visiting the Museum of Broadcast Communications about 15 years ago. I didn’t find much radio by Corwin at the time, but there was a videotape of one of his early 70s TV shows. It was a lot like his radio: playing with ideas in a middle-brow, Clifton Fadimanesque sort of way.
His most famous piece was “On A Note of Triumph,” produced for VE Day, and heard by about 60 million Americans as a time when there were only 140 million of them. We used to listen to a lot of old time radio on those cross-country trips, and I remember hearing this one in the car, myself for the first time, my parents probably for the umpteenth. Here it is.
We can forgive his nods to Joe Stalin. After all, it was still 1945, the Russians had done the messy work of taking Berlin, and they were on our side.
Corwin also wrote a 1-hour homage to the Bill of Rights, titled, “We Hold These Truths.” Corwin was a pretty typical mid-century liberal, before the movement had become radicalized. So while the title derives from the Declaration of Independence, most understood that the Constitution was intended to safeguard our rights, and that the criticisms of it largely revolved around its failure to explicitly include a Bill of Rights. There’s nothing in there that a Tea Party activist could object to, and much he could cheer. For instance, his explanation of the 2nd Amendment, in the mouth of an average citizen reading it for the first time:
That means if somebody gets into office and turns sour on the the people that put him there, well he can’t vex us with a standing army he way George did before the war. No sir, we people of the states, if we got arms, nobody’s going to order us to do things that the majority of the people ain’t voted for. Least not without a fight.
Charles Kuralt did a one-hour homage to Corwin that I can’t possibly hope to match. You can hear it here. It, and the rest of the links here, are well worth your time.
There Is No National Bridge Crisis
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Economics, PPC, President 2012, Transportation on October 17th, 2011
Bridges make great campaign backdrops, as President Obama tried to exploit the other week while introducing his jobs bill. Trumpeting the desperate shape of America’s bridges, Obama spoke in front of a bridge between John Boehner’s Ohio and Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky, (a bridge that, as was noted at the time, wouldn’t have been eligible for funding under his new spending spree). Listening to him – and to just about every other public-works-booster in the last 20 years – you’d think that it was only a matter of time, months perhaps, before we found ourselves trapped behind rivers and gorges, as our bridges collapsed into dust.
Not so.
In fact, both as a percentage and in absolute terms, American bridges that are classified either Structurally Deficient or Functionally Obsolete has been falling for at least two decades. The percentage is aided by natural growth and new bridge-building. But that doesn’t account for the decline in absolute terms:
Over the last 19 years, we’ve added about 6% to our national bridge inventory, while the number of Obsolete bridges has declined by about 4% in absolute terms, and the number of Structurally Deficient bridges is down by over 40% in absolute terms:
Structurally Deficient means that the bridge’s actual structure has deteriorated, or the bridge is on a working road and has had to be taken out of service. Functionally Obsolete means that the bridge is now too narrow or too low for the highway system that it’s a part of. And under the FHWA’s 10-Year Rule, no bridge that’s been built or upgraded or repaired to spec in the last 10 years is either Deficient or Obsolete. If a bridge is both Deficient and Obsolete, it’s only classified as Deficient. On a percentage basis, the achievement is even more striking:
The percentage of Structurally Deficient bridges has declined from over 20% to just over 11%, and the number and percentage of Obsolete bridges has declined, even as the national highway system has been continuously upgraded and extended.
In Colorado, the percentages are better than the national average, and have been since 1998 (the first year I could find state-level records). Currently, they stand at 7% Deficient and 10% Obsolete, even as the number of bridges has grown by 8% since 1998.
It might also help to look at the highway spending numbers over the last 20 years. I suspect that some of the increase in the late 90s’ Obsolete totals is a result of upgrading the surrounding road system, and that the decline in Obsolescence in the last 10 years represents a shifting of priorities, even as the number of bridges continues to climb.
Notably, what you don’t see is any massive improvement in the numbers from 2009 to 2010, the Year Of the Shovel-Ready Project. There’s a slight improvement, but nothing out of line with historical trends, which suggests that all that ARRA money wasn’t really going where it was advertised.
It’s possible, I suppose, that we’re coming up on the end of the useful life of some large number of bridges sometime in the new few years, but I doubt it. We’ve been growing the system and doing maintenance since the 1950s, and this Bridge and Highway crisis is one I’ve been hearing about as long as I can remember. Once one of these memes makes it into the public discourse, it seems it’s almost impossible to get rid of, no matter how much progress has been made.
Not A Mirror Image
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC, President 2012 on October 12th, 2011
The Occupationists are the lefty equivalent of the Tea Party, and as such, pose as much of a threat to establishment Democrats as the Tea Party activists do to the establishment Republicans. In fact, it is a movement that has the potential to spin wildly out of control, devouring the Democrats who seek to control it. So goes the current thinking about the Occupy demonstrations that, with but few more demonstrators nationwide than Tea Party events got in individual cities last year, have suddenly occupied the national media’s attention.
This thinking is wrong, and there is every reason to believe that its promotion by Democrat activists is actually part of the strategy.
For one thing, if Peter Wehner is correct, and establishment Democrats need to be wary of Occupy, one could start by asking why they aren’t. From labor unions to the AAUP to the White House (somewhat more coolly) to Congressional Democrats, the left-liberal establishment has decided that this is a movement worth supporting.
The Tea Party, while it may have provided the energy behind the 2010 elections, was (and is) unhappy about the lack of a coherent conservative message coming from Republican leadership. Indeed, prior to the Tea Party’s emergence, it would have been hard to identify any coherent message coming from Republican leadership.
This is at least in part because the movement, such as it is, is essentially parrotting the line that the Democrat leadership has been peddling for four years, and amplifying over the last few months – blame capitalism, blame Wall Street, blame business, above all, blame “the rich.” They may not be happy about regulatory capture, but they’re not demonstrating against the regulations.
Because people were clearly tuning this message out when it came from the White House, Congressional Democrats, and labor unions (public or private), an “authentic voice” was needed to promote it, from people who could be portrayed as being true victims, rather than authors of their own misfortune.
Enter the unemployable graduates, holders of unmarketable sheepskins, and being crushed by student loans, of Occupy. This is not a spontaneous movement. Spontaneous movements do not advertise for paid organizing positions. It is another organized mob, intended to provide a sympathetic face to the Left’s arguments that whatever the problem is, it’s not government policies that got us here.
In fact, this strategy has already had a dry run. This summer. In Israel.
According to an investigative report by Maariv’s Kalman Libeskind, Democratic operative and pollster Stanley Greenberg, who, along with James Carville, Bob Shrum, and others, was part of a team sent by Bill Clinton to drive Netanyahu from office in 1999, is again trying to influence Israeli politics.
His mission: stoking economic discontent into a protest movement intended to again, replace Benjamin Netanyahu with a leader more willing to sell out to American leftists and make concessions to the Palestinians.
While the movement there doesn’t seem to have weakened Netanyahu, it does seem to have revitalized Labour to some extent. Israel has socialist roots whose symbolism still resonates there. (Political cultures, even within the Anglosphere, differ, thank goodness.) The mission here is not to undermine a sitting President, but rather to force the debate onto ground more favorable to the Democrats, to force Republicans to confront the presumed trump card of “fairness.”
For these reasons, the Occupy movement is less a mirror of the Tea Party, and more like the Democrats’ Portrait of Dorian Grey.
Conservatives and Republicans have already won a series of special elections and recall elections by coming up with answers to the political class and the public employee unions. Recognizing and pointing out that it’s the same set who’s pulling the strings here is the first step towards keeping the ideological and policy lines clear, and maintaining momentum going into the election season.
Build a Fence Around the Bubble
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Education, PPC, President 2012 on October 11th, 2011
Looks as though a lot of The Occupation could use a good college-level education. Someone’s noticed that The Occupation of those without an occupation is as much about the Higher Education Bubble as much as anything else (h/t Instapundit), only those involved don’t even realize it.
There’s just one thing that confuses me: a lot of these POWS seem to be mad that they were forced to accumulate a ton of debt with the stew-dent loans that they were tricked into taking to support them for 7 years while completing their degrees in Recycling Studies and beer pong. Now they find out – not only can they not get a job in the field that they picked to “follow their bliss” butt they’re expected to pay their loans back too! That is so unfair. No wonder they want to spread the the other 1%’s wealth around.
Butt seriously: why are they occupying Wall Street? Shouldn’t they be occupying the administration buildings of the universities? Aren’t they the ones cranking out worthless degrees that they’re charging $10-100,000 a year for? How, exactly, is this Colgate-Palmolive’s fault? Other than the fact they’re successful, greedy capitalists?
Actually, the American Association of University Professors noticed, too:
The dedicated students whom we teach at institutions of higher education are being forced to pay more for tuition and go deeper into debt because of cuts in state funding, only to find themselves unemployed when they graduate.
The majority of college and university faculty positions are now insecure, part-time jobs. In addition, attacks on collective bargaining have been rampant throughout the nation, as our job security, wages, health benefits, and pensions have been either reduced or slated for elimination.
Therefore, it is time to stand up for what is right.
Evidently, what’s “right” doesn’t include university faculty – or their former students – having to live in the real world, where all jobs are always insecure, health benefits have been disappearing for decades, and most of us have had to provide for our own pensions for our whole working lives. We actually accept these economic realities for ourselves, and bristle at the notion that someone else feels entitled get a lifelong scholarship for them, on our dime.
In fact, they’d like the laws of economics not to apply to higher education at all. Heavily subsidized, colleges have not necessarily put this money towards decreasing class sizes or improving instruction. Instead, they have raised tuition to match the subsidies, and put the money towards branding and administrative bloat. In Colorado, at least, they’ve managed to avoid accountability for their spending. Look at the University of Colorado website, and while you’ll have no trouble at all finding out where the money comes from, good luck figuring out how it gets spent. For years, the legislature has tried to get a straight answer to the question, “how much does it cost to educate a student from enrollment to awarding of a bachelor’s degree?” No dice.
Worse, as far as the students are concerned, colleges & universities have been marketing the generic bachelors degree as the key to lifetime employment security, regardless of the degree. This, at the same time as they have been marketing themselves to the taxpayers as the engines of technological growth. That 25%-30% of CU’s bachelor’s degrees over the last decade have been in psychology, the social sciences, or area & ethnic studies somewhat undermines both claims.
Now, I know of some sociology majors who, after have complete four years of college, have returned home to help out with the family business, and find the work fascinating. That’s fine if you’re expecting a $50,000 debt for finishing school. But I’m guessing that most people don’t have that opportunity. They, like their parents, have to work for someone else, and “Bring Your Kids To Work Day” is pretty much over by the time they’re 22. So they need a degree that will help prepare them for that.
This is not an attack on the liberal arts, or to suggest that math and science be studied solely in preparation for an engineering career. The wild success of The Teaching Company is proof that adults, with real financial obligations, can be enticed to pay hundreds of dollars for quality courses in history, philosophy, literature, music, and science. It’s proof that adults, with real world experience, realize the value of those subjects in helping them make sense of the world and grapple with tough issues.
The whining of the professors and their former students is, on the contrary, evidence of how the modern university instead cheats its current students by utterly failing them in this regard, and how easy it is to prey on college-bound students and their parents who only want the best for them.
That they have been the victims of a swindle almost as colossal as Social Security is undeniable. Too many students have been sold a bill of goods by their government and the universities they attend. Too bad they don’t have the critical thinking skills to be protesting at the right address.
Transportation Spending an Indicator?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Economics, PPC, Transportation on October 5th, 2011
Over at Carpe Diem (if you’re not reading it, you should), Mark Perry is arguing against a double-dip recession, suggesting instead that continued sluggish growth, the sort of grey sludge economy we’ve had for a while now, is the mostly likely scenario. One of his indicators is rail intermodal traffic, which set a volume record last week:
By itself, this doesn’t seem to be too strong an indicator. We’re just about at the seasonal high for the year, and year-over-year, the increase isn’t all that impressive. Also, when I spoke with the head of UP’s media relations a few months ago, he agreed that intermodal generally moves finished goods, and is an indicator of consumption, while non-intermodal carloads are raw materials, and thus a better proxy for production. They’ve barely moved. So both sides seem to confirm what the other numbers are showing.
But up is better than down, and some of the weakness may be capacity. Railroads seem to be moving to deal with that problem, and railcar manufacturers in Virginia and Arkansas are hiring new workers to meet the demand. Most of this is coming from lighter, stronger coal cars, as well as chemical and petroleum cars.
I’m contracting at a major trucker based in Omaha, and they’ve been reluctant to increase capacity for a couple of reasons, including general uncertainty. There’s a shortage of long-haul drivers, and already a capacity constraint, and yet they and at least one other mid-sized truck company I’ve spoken to are still not expanding their fleets.
However, they seem to be the exception. Transport Topics (behind a paywall) is reporting that Class 8 truck sales – which include all tractor-trailers – are the highest since early 2007. Some of this may be in anticipation of new rules that will force companies to have more trucks on the road to deliver the same amount of goods. To that extent – if at all – the additional purchases are an inefficient allocation of capital. But they aren’t likely the entire source of growth. Companies are already short of inventory and capacity, and are simply expanding to meet perceived demand.
In theory, all these increased orders for trucks and railcars should be predicting continued economic growth. In practice, we could still get blindsided by Europe, or it could be an example of companies expanding into a contraction, like a classic business cycle.
Nobel Prizes and Consensus – Updated
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on October 5th, 2011
So much for the idea that science operates by consensus. If it did, Dan Schechtman would still be working in obscurity, rather than having just been named the 2011 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.
Schechtman won for discovering something called quasicrystals (the article is a little technical). We all think we know what crystals look like: solid forms that are not only symmetrical, but that also repeat endlessly. Schechtman discovered crystal structures that are symmetrical, but have patterns that don’t repeat – ever – when they’re put next to each other. It’s a three-dimensional analogue to Penrose Tiling, where the pattern is symmetrical about the center (in this case, it repeats 5 times), but never repeats as you move outward.
The world of crystallography didn’t receive Schechtman’s discovery with open arms:
“People didn’t think that this kind of crystal existed,” she said. “They thought it was against the rules of nature.”
…
“I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me,” Shechtman said in a description of his work released by his university.
For months he tried to persuade his colleagues of his find, but they refused to accept it. Finally he was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the institute.
Shechtman returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected, but finally published in November 1984 — to uproar in the scientific world. Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling was among those who never accepted the findings.
“He would stand on those platforms and declare, ‘Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,”’ Shechtman said.
Schechtman encountered fierce resistance to a laboratory discovery, and was rightly forced to go through the scientific process of debate, discussion, and reproducible experiment. Computer models showing that such shapes were possible wouldn’t have been enough. Making the lab measurements wouldn’t have been enough. Making the crystals in once wouldn’t have been enough. Explaining other scientists’ data wouldn’t have been enough. Only when he was able to use his discovery to make useful predictions was it enough for us. (The article says that the discovery took place on April 8, 1982, which corresponds to the first day of Passover that year. Insiders will understand the structure of this paragraph.)
Climate orthodoxy considers itself bound by almost none of these constraints, and seeks to operate by consensus. Science can be as susceptible to groupthink as any other pursuit. It’s only the rigor of repeatable, predictive, real-world experimentation that keeps it grounded and validates its conclusions.
UPDATE: The official Nobel Prize press release recognizes Schechtman’s, “fierce battle against established science.” Imagine that.
Black Monday
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, National Politics, PPC, President 2012 on October 4th, 2011
No, not at the stock market, although there was plenty of bad news there, too yesterday.
October 3, 2011 was Black Monday for the Obama Administration. One long-developing scandal finally threatened to decapitate the most politicized Justice Department since John Mitchell, and another from Obama’s campaign past burst onto the scene, undermining the President’s carefully-tended post-racial image.
CBS News obtained documents that Eric Holder knew about Operation Fast and Furious long before he said he did, in sworn testimony before Congress.
New documents obtained by CBS News show Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010. That directly contradicts his statement to Congress.
On May 3, 2011, Holder told a Judiciary Committee hearing, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
Yet internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.
CBS then links to three different memos that Holder would have received – and we can easily believe there were others – discussing Fast and Furious over the 10 months prior to Holder’s testimony.
In other words, the Attorney General of the United States lied under oath to a Congressional committee in order to save himself, confuse investigators’ timelines, and give himself more time to construct a “narrative.”
The Justice Department has an explanation, naturally:
The Justice Department told CBS News that the officials in those emails were talking about a different case started before Eric Holder became Attorney General. And tonight they tell CBS News, Holder misunderstood that question from the committee – he did know about Fast and Furious – just not the details.
If the first claim is true, the Administration will need to produce documentation not only about that earlier case, but also a broad paper trail about the Department’s handling of it. Remember, they need not only prove that such a case existed, but that the attorneys involved were discussing it, not Gunwalker.
As for Holder’s claim that he “misunderstood the question,” go to the link and watch the testimony yourself. Rep. Issa asks a simple, straightforward question: “When did you first know about the program officially called, ‘Fast and Furious?'” Holder then says, “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.”
I’m not sure what there was to misunderstand, unless such misunderstanding was deliberate. Whatever one thinks of Holder’s politics or the way he’s corrupted the Justice Department with politics, he’s a government lawyer with long experience testifying before Congress in various capacities. The idea that he didn’t understand the meaning of “when did you first hear?” is simply not credible.
The MSM has been singularly sympathetic to the Obama Administration, but its coverage of Fast and Furious has actually been pretty decent, given their time and space constraints. The Washington Post in particular has devoted significantly more space to this than it has, even, to campground signage in west Texas. With the emergence of direct evidence that the Administration, in the person of its Attorney General, has been not merely stonewalling, but also actively lying in order to cover up the scandal, the phrase “Worse than Watergate” begins to take on real meaning.
Combine that with evidence that Elana Kagan did the same during her Supreme Court confirmation testimony, in order to place herself in a position to defend the Progressives’ signature Obamacare legislation, and a patter begins to emerge of administration contempt for Congress, parallel to its contempt for the people its supposed to be governing.
At the same time, Andrew Breitbart uncovered photos of then-Senator Obama campaigning in 2007 with the New Black Panthers. (John Sexton over at Big Government has found the video of Obama’s speech that he gave at the same event, along with the take that the New Black Panthers’ Malik Shabazz had on Obama’s remarks.)
Barack Obama has carefully constructed an image of himself as post-racial, and used that image to great political effect. Sharing a stage with bigots and racial provocateurs like the New Black Panthers, even if only to shore up his authenticity among Black voters, does much to undermine that image. Now Attorney General Holder’s decision to drop a case that had already been won, against the Panthers in Philadelphia, begins to look less like just racial bias – a damning enough trait in a Justice Department – but also like political payback.
Normally, candidates get a couple of “resets” during a campaign. After they’re elected, it’s their record, not their campaign, that we judge them by. And for the most part, after they’re nominated for the next office, most of the primary campaign is forgotten. This can be useful, allowing the public to focus on the debate at hand, and deferring to the judgment of those who had to make previous nominating and election decisions.
But with a too-friendly press, such deliberate amnesia can also be manipulated, and in this case the MSM has been derelict in its duty. Only Juan Williams, evidently, commented on the joint appearance at the time, and the rest of the MSM ignored it, no doubt because it didn’t fit their narrative.
Barack Obama campaigned to white America as a post-racial healer, one who, for the price of a vote, offer absolution for its past racial sins. And yet, in the very speech where he quotes a latter from a pastor encouraging him to be true to his ideals, he’s compromising that image. Moreover, with such a tissue-thin level of achievement up to that point, and with a lamentable record as President, the facts of his past presidential campaign which were never vetted properly at the time become relevant to our judgment about him now.
Both of these, politically and substantively, are far more important than west Texas campground signage and whatever the appropriate level of contemporaneous outrage should have been, and far more important than astro-turfed “rallies” whose job it is to distract us and to change the subject.
The Candidates Return to Capis..er..Iowa
Posted by Joshua Sharf in 2012 Presidential Race, Colorado Politics, Governor 2010, National Politics, PPC on September 16th, 2011
And in the due course of time, every four years, presidential candidates return to Iowa. As a service to readers, I’m trying to keep an eye on the Council Bluffs calendar (and Sioux City on Sundays), so I can sneak over and record as many events as I can. While we see the debates, it’s often at these meet-and-greets that the candidates get a chance to do the retail politicking that will win or lose them votes.
This afternoon, it was Rick Perry’s turn, with an event at Tish’s Restaurant. He spoke for just under 11 minutes, didn’t take any questions, and dived right into the crowd to shake hands. He took a few more shots at Romneycare than we’ve seen before, updating the stump speech to talk about a Beacon Hill Institute report about its effects on the Massachusetts economy.
As these events are designed to do, it drew supporters, opponents, and undecideds, and Perry seemed to score his biggest applause on his standard line that he, “will work to make Washington as inconsequential as possible.” One Romney supporter I spoke with said that the crowd – about 120 people – was about the right size for a top-tier candidate event at this point in the cycle.
So presented here, for the record, is the current version of his stump speech.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Wyoming High-Flow Toilet Scam
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Colorado Politics, Economics, PPC, Regulation on September 13th, 2011
Hat-Tip to Amy Oliver for this. According to the Denver Post, utility managers are pushing to outlaw at a state level that which is already outlawed at a federal level: your normal, regular, works-with-one-flush toilet. You wouldn’t actually have to trade it your working toilet for the hobbled version, but according to the proposed law, “manufacturers could not sell” regular toilets.
The water savings wouldn’t be trivial, but are mostly notional: two generations from now it could amount to enough for 88,000 families of four. What population and use numbers went into that estimate, the Post doesn’t say. Even now, that’s barely 5% of the population, when home water use accounts for less than half of total consumption. And while the article notes that Denver’s sewage system functions less efficiently with lower flow, the operating costs of that inefficiency (both monetary and aquiferous), and the capital expense required to mitigate, go unmentioned.
Aside from the article’s shoddy economics, there’s also the incentive system it sets up. There’s already quite a grey market in regular toilets from housing projects (friends of mine were careful to preserve theirs when they remodeled a few years ago), and this will only make it worse. The ban would apply to manufacturers, not individuals or remodelers, so no doubt, there will soon be calls to “close the Home-Fixtures Show Loophole.” And at least until the big boys move in, and add another layer of middle-men to the process, you’ll see wild-eyed dreamers thinking up schemes like this.
Infrastructure and Spending
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Economics, PPC on September 6th, 2011
Word on the street is that President Obama will call for yet more “infrastructure” spending in his Wednesday Thursday night campaign speech address to Congress. Russ Roberts, of Econtalk, makes the effective rebuttal to this idea (as with most of the President’s ideas, it’s too amorphous to call it a “plan”) in two posts, “Crumbling“, and “Shovel Ready.” In Shovel Ready, he notes that Japan spent a decade spending money on “shovel ready” public works projects that provided little economic benefit above and beyond the circulation of currency for its own sake (or its own sake).
In Crumbling, he shows that we’ve been increasing the percentage of GDP spent on infrastructure for about three decades, and yet still hear complaints about “crumbling infrastructure.’ He then goes on to quote a New York Times column giving examples of waste here. One thing he doesn’t mention is that building pointless roads isn’t just a one-time expense – we’re stuck with the maintenance of those roads pretty much forever, lest they, too “crumble.”
Of course, this was before the most recent “stimulus,” and all those orange signs proclaiming spending throughout the land and to all the commutants thereof.
Taken as a whole, it’s a powerful argument against the sort of fire-hose spending “plan” that will likely be announced Thursday night.
I happen to believe that infrastructure is one of the proper areas for government spending, for a variety of reasons. How best to do that can be the subject of vigorous debate, but the story of the Kansas Turnpike shows the risks incurred when interstate projects aren’t attempted by an interstate authority. (For the moment, I’m happy to revisit the debates over political economy from the 1940s, but not the 1840s.)
All of this is what makes the first stimulus package such a shame. In the 1950s, we had the luxury of buying North Dakota’s support for I-95 with I-94. We could make a lot of mistakes, and still get the thing basically right. We don’t have that luxury now. Wasting almost $1,000,000,000,000 in “infrastructure” spending in 2009 doesn’t mean we get to go back and clean up the mess. It means we don’t have the money to do it right this time, so there is no this time.
A friend of mine likes to bemoan Americans who won’t spend on infrastructure, but it’s probably one of the few areas where the overwhelming majority of us actually do agree. And if the government weren’t so busy doing all the other things it shouldn’t be doing, it might actually have the attention and money to get this one right.
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