Where Obama’s jobs bill falls short

[dtotire]

Fareed Zakaria Opinion Writer

Where Obama’s jobs bill falls short


President Obama’s jobs bill is better than doing nothing in the face of a national crisis, but it won’t have much impact on unemployment. Many of the measures are short-term tax breaks and benefits that are unlikely to affect demand for products and services — business’s fundamental problem — and so won’t boost hiring. Moreover, many of the measures are efforts to get consumers spending again. Given what happened after Americans maxed out their credit cards and used homes as ATMs, consumers are understandably cautious.

There is one area where government can create demand — regardless of private-sector behavior — and in a way that is productive for long-term growth: building infrastructure. The president’s plan contains some proposals for this, but we need something much more ambitious. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that America’s crumbling infrastructure — ranked ninth in the world a decade ago and, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, now 24th and falling — needs $2 trillion worth of repairs, upgrades and expansions. With needs on that scale, why are proposals at 1/20th that size being floated? We need a more ambitious effort — which requires a grand bargain between Republicans and Democrats.


The first element of the bargain would be funding. Already, there are several good proposals for infrastructure banks, including from Obama and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.). They adapt a model used in much of the world, particularly in Europe. Relatively small public investments can be leveraged to attract much larger sums of private capital. Projects should be awarded based on need and merit only. Compared with other nations, the United States has astonishingly little private-sector involvement in the building of infrastructure such as roads, bridges and highways. Such a bank would allow us to create smart public-private partnerships that are market-friendly and efficient. But Republicans would have to agree to make serious public investments so that the banks could take on projects on a scale that would make a dent in unemployment.


Obama said he was surprised that there are so few shovel-ready projects. But the regulations, reviews and permits required to approve infrastructure ensures that any major project takes years, often decades, to be shovel-ready. In fact, one study of a set of infrastructure projects found that, of all countries examined, the United States has the highest proportion of projects stuck at the “pre-approval stage” of announced but still three to 10 years from construction — more than 31 / 2 times the number of such projects, by value, in Europe.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-obamas-jobs-bill-falls-short/2011/09/28/gIQA5jne5K_story.html?hpid=z3

[SlimJimmy]

1. I want to know what happened to the billions for infrastruture in the previous

jobs program. We keep hearing about it, but my understanding is it was a tiny fraction of the money.