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Lack Of Stimulation

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September 9, 2010

You don’t have to look very far to find a rabid, hostile reaction to President Obama’s proposed $50 billion transportation infrastructure program.  After all – it’s an election year.  I was quite surprised when I read this paragraph from a BusinessWeek report about the proposal:

For companies that do the unglamorous work of pouring cement, crushing stones, and hauling earth, President Barack Obama’s $50 billion proposal outlined on Sept. 6 to rebuild U.S. roads, railways, and runways is welcome relief amid unrelenting economic gloom.  If approved by Congress (an uncertain proposition in an election year) Obama’s plan would pick up the slack when most of the highway stimulus funds under the $814 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is expected to be spent next year, says Mike Betts, an analyst with London-based Jefferies.

Stop and think about that for a moment.  The phrase I wish to bring to your attention is:

.  .  .   most of the highway stimulus funds under the $814 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is expected to be spent next year    .  .  .

The first question that came to mind was:  Why the hell wasn’t it spent last year?  We’ve been reading about how the effects of the “Obama stimulus bill” (a/k/a  the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) have already stopped boosting the economy.  How much more of that money has been sitting on the sidelines?  Beyond that, why didn’t the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provide more funding for infrastructure?

The proposed transportation infrastructure program will cost approximately the same as the B-2 Stealth Bomber program, which produced 21 bombers at an average cost of $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars.

Since July of last year, I have been among those arguing that the $787 billion economic stimulus package was inadequate, after reading about a Bloomberg survey of economists, which supported that conclusion in February of 2009.  In early 2009, there was a greater sense of urgency about the state of the economy and a stronger political will to enact a more significant stimulus.  Unfortunately, President Obama was not up to the task of pushing a larger bill through.  As a result, the President is now making piecemeal stimulus efforts, such as the $50-billion infrastructure proposal.  The tragedy of not getting it right the first time seemed more unfortunate after I read a recent posting by Barry Ritholtz at his blog, The Big Picture.  Here is what Mr. Ritholtz had to say:

Yesterday on XM Sirius, we discussed Infrastructure.

One of the callers was a civil engineer who suggested we take a look at the US Infrastructure Report Card (infrastructurereportcard.org), which grades the US on a variety of factors.  The 2009 Grades include: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads(D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-).

Overall, America’s Infrastructure GPA was graded a “D.”  To get to an “A” requires a 5 year infrastructure investment of $2.2 Trillion dollars.  Hence, you can understand if I am underwhelmed by the latest $50B proposal.

Each individual state is also graded;  NY’s is after the jump.

After reading about the Infrastructure Report Card, I couldn’t help but wonder how our economy would have benefited from a $2.2 trillion infrastructure program rather than the $850 billion stimulus program enacted in 2009.  Consider what economist Joseph Stiglitz had to say about how the global financial crisis was affecting Australia in August of 2010:

Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister when the crisis struck, put in place one of the best-designed Keynesian stimulus packages of any country in the world.  He realized that it was important to act early, with money that would be spent quickly, but that there was a risk that the crisis would not be over soon. So the first part of the stimulus was cash grants, followed by investments, which would take longer to put into place.

Rudd’s stimulus worked: Australia had the shortest and shallowest of recessions of the advanced industrial countries.

There’s a right way of doing economic stimulus and a wrong way of implementing such a program.  Unfortunately, America did it the wrong way.





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