Obama Hopeful Congress Will Pass Stimulus Plan Despite GOP Resistance
...
Many Republican lawmakers say the $825 billion package is too costly, and that too much of the spending is for long-range projects that won't aid the economy quickly.
…
Democrats tried to mitigate the impact of a Congressional Budget Office study that questioned administration claims that the money could be spent fast enough to reduce joblessness quickly.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said there was "significant discussion about the CBO numbers."
He said Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, who recently headed the CBO, told participants that the study analyzed only 40 percent of the pending stimulus bill and that Orszag "would guarantee that at least 75 percent of the bill would go directly into the economy within the first 18 months."
...
Let's look at this for a moment:
If we are going to go burden our children with long-tern debt for this program, than we should try to spend the funds on long-term infrastructure improvements from which our children will benefit.
Funding "shovel-ready" projects will rapidly move lots of bucks into material procurement and labor, without waiting for a lengthy design process.
Even "shovel-ready" projects have performance schedules that last for 3-7years (and some, like mass transit, even longer). A project that spends 75% of its funding in 18 mos is probably a 24-30 month program - so forget about bridges, dams, highways, power-grids, non-fossil fuel power plants, power-grid improvements, mass transit, etc.
In other words, projects that spend most of the funds in a short up-front burst are NOT the projects we want.
However, once long-term infrastructure programs have guaranteed funding, they will immediately kick off private enterprise projects that will ride their coat-tails. (New commercial and residential centers, etc.)
Neither side is thinking clearly!
der Brucer
