Posted on 10/08/2010 10:31:26 AM PDT by Titus-Maximus
The Erie Canal. Hoover Dam. The Interstate Highway System. Visionary public projects are part of the American tradition, and have been a major driver of our economic development. And right now, by any rational calculation, would be an especially good time to improve the nation’s infrastructure. We have the need: our roads, our rail lines, our water and sewer systems are antiquated and increasingly inadequate. We have the resources: a million-and-a-half construction workers are sitting idle, and putting them to work would help the economy as a whole recover from its slump. And the price is right: with interest rates on federal debt at near-record lows, there has never been a better time to borrow for long-term investment. But American politics these days is anything but rational. Republicans bitterly opposed even the modest infrastructure spending contained in the Obama stimulus plan. And, on Thursday, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, canceled America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Krugman thinks you can just keep taxing - as if that is the magical answer for everything, and it convinces me more and more why these people should not be in positions of power. They arrogantly steal peoples' money and create the Big Dig and think that it is real progress. They burn resources and in the end their wasteful work isn't much better and their are net losses to the economy!
This is Krugman conjuring up Republican-hate in the guise of economic brilliance, which it certainly isn't.
Everyone is abandoning socialism except Krugman.
I’ll see those projects and raise you:
Big Dig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dig
And Denver International Airport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport
The Erie Canal was financed privately, was it not?
So was the massive boom in railroad building from 1840-1880.
Who needs expensive, corrupt Govt to do this???
Krugman is not entirely wrong here. There was no "stimulus". Congress passed a bill full of $787B dollars worth of liberal pet projects, the vast majority of it being nonsense.
Deficit spending in a recession is fine, and spending on infrastructure is a fine idea, but we are too far down the road of wasteful govt. spending at this point.
Let's start cutting pork, and I'd be all for spending on infrastructure.
The project that irks me the most is the construction of the bridge just up the road from us. It’s been done since August 21 but they still have funds left apparently and they’re not going to open it until the funds are gone.
They just kinda stand around alot.
Mr. Krugman, I don’t know if you’ve looked lately but New Jersey is broke; B-R-O-K-E. As in NO MONEY!! None. And that’s with one of the highest tax burdens in the entire universe. Governor Christie did the adult thing here and you just can’t seem to get it. And you are supposed to be some big-time, world acclaimed economist.
Makes me wonder if Paul can can count to 10 using all of his fingers.
How about a nice big border fence?
If I our federal, state, and local governments were doing the job they should be doing our infrastructure would be up to date. Instead they’re spending money on themselves, the public sector unions, and tranfer payments to crooks and layabouts.
Someone should ask Krugman where is all the money going? If it’s not going to infrastructure, where is it going? Should be a simple question to answer for a Nobel awarded, part-time economist.
Sorry Krugman, but we are utterly broke thanks to the total corruption of your wonderful Democrat Party Regime.
No. The canal was financed by the state of New York. The debt was paid off by tolls, fairly quickly.
“America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.”
sez who?
Never heard of it.
Today railroads are certainly exceedingly valuable and may well be a technology that will continue to be of use well into the future, but do we need 1898's 250,000 miles of track, or can we do the job with only 139,887 miles?
With respect to highways, do we really need extra lanes on all the Interstate quality roadway or can we continue developing auto-pilot systems for cars and more than double both the speed we can move the cars down the road, and the number of cars to be moved (a 4 fold improvement)?
Will another tunnel from New Jersey to New York be meaningful?
How about a third airport for Indianapolis Indiana to handle nothing but express freight? Or would it be more useful to pave an additional runway at Kansas City, or maybe Minneapolis?
If central water supply systems are no longer adequate, how about adding extra capacity in the form of local compact recycling units at major places of employment, schools, and large housing developments? Certainly a technological "fix" costing a few tens of millions of bucks can easily displace a steel and concrete "expansion" that costs billions!
I think the man's brain is frozen.
No, it's not fine. It's just one of those Keynsian notions that is repeated so often that everyone assumes it must be true.
Anyone who understands economics knows that public building projects contribute to the general welfare precisely inasmuch as the finished project is itself economically productive. The BUILDING PROCESS, and the SPENDING, are economic NEGATIVES—i.e., to the extent that the project requires RESOURCES, it COSTS society.
This reminds me: I saw a program on National Geographic in which they had a bunch of engineers designed a bigger, better Hoover Dam. The cost of the IMPROVED dam, they said, would be about $6 Billion.
Has anybody seen ANYTHING come out of the $1 Trillion in porkulus spending that looks anything like a Hoover Dam?
What absolutely galls me, is having a Communist assert that adherence to the founding principles is “ideological”. Geroge Orwell in “1984” called this NEWSPEAK. On the contrary, the philosophical school know as German Idealism through Kant and Hegel and ultimately through Marx and Engles is IDEOLOGY. German Idealists make up words for things that do not exist: like Kant’s MONAD and Paul Krugman’s GONAD. Talk about deluded. And it is repugnant and loathesome to anyone that believes in a democratic republic.
Paul Krugman is the very definition of an ideologue—along with Obama and Pelosi. Reid isn’t intelligent enough to be an ideologue—he’s just a party hack.
If you want to put construction workers back to work, get rid of the illegal aliens
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