Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[doctoroe]

Obama Pledges Massive Public Works Program
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama committed Saturday to the largest public works building program since the creation of the interstate highway system a half century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.

“We need action — and action now,” he said in an address taped for broadcast Saturday morning on radio and YouTube.

The address followed the latest grim economic report indicating the country lost 533,000 jobs in November alone, bringing the total job loss over the past year to nearly 2 million. Although Mr. Obama remains weeks away from taking office, the report ratcheted up the pressure on him to assert leadership during the interregnum before his inauguration.

Mr. Obama and his team are working with Congressional leaders to fashion a spending package that could invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy. A big part of that would be infrastructure projects such as building or repairing roads, bridges, schools, sewer systems and other public utilities. Democrats hope the new Congress that takes office in early January could pass such a measure in time for Mr. Obama to sign almost instantly after taking office Jan. 20.

The president-elect in his Saturday address offered some general ideas of what he wants to see in the package. Besides public works construction, he promised to make government buildings more energy efficient, modernize school classrooms and libraries with computers, expand access to broadband Internet service and upgrade information technology in hospitals and doctors’ offices.

The big ticket will be the public works spending. “We will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s,” Mr. Obama said.

He did not give any estimate of how much he would devote to that purpose, but when he met with the nation’s governors this week, they said the states had $136 billion worth of already-approved road, bridge and other projects ready to go as soon as funding became available. They estimated each billion dollars spent would create 40,000 jobs.

By invoking the federal interstate program, Mr. Obama sought to summon the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who launched the highway construction that became integral to the nation’s economic development. That imagery seemed intended to respond to critics, who argue that public works spending historically has not been a reliable catalyst for short-term economic growth and instead is more about politicians gaining points with constituents.

Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, ultimately resulting in the construction of 42,795 miles of roads. In 1991, the government concluded that the total cost came to $128.9 billion, with the federal government bearing $114.3 billion of the tab and the states picking up the rest.

Mr. Obama promised to set new rules to govern spending, such as a “use it or lose it” requirement that states act quickly to invest in roads and bridges or sacrifice the federal funds. “We won’t do it the old Washington way,” Mr. Obama said. “We won’t just throw money at the problem. We’ll measure progress by the reforms we make and the results we achieve — by the jobs we create, by the energy we save, by whether America is more competitive in the world.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/us/politics/07radio.html?_r=1&hp