About Me 0060: Making Money Without

It was a nice idea. Today the unemployment rate is hovering above 9 percent—better than it would have been without the stimulus, most experts agree, but still painfully high. Why didn’t we get more for our money?

While liberals and conservatives alike blame the stimulus itself—It wasn’t big enough! It was never going to work!—the problem may have more to do with how the money was spent. It’s not enough just to inject money into infrastructure, because not all transportation funding is created equal—or at least, it doesn’t create jobs at an equal rate. As any infrastructure policy wonk can tell you, money spent on fixing up existing systems or building mass transit delivers more jobs, and faster, than building new highways. With their wallets bulging with their federal allowance, the states were allowed to spend $26.6 billion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money however they saw fit.

A new study shows that most states didn’t end up making the most of the windfall. The report by the transportation research group Smart Growth America found that states spent more than a third of the money on building new roads—rather than working on public transportation and fixing up existing roads and bridges. The result of the indiscriminate spending? States missed out on potentially thousands of new jobs—and bridges, roads, and overpasses around the country are still crumbling. Meanwhile, the states that did put dollars toward public transportation were richly rewarded: Each dollar used on transit was 75 percent more effective at putting people to work than a dollar used for highway work.

The government meant to get the biggest bang for its buck, with “shovel-ready projects.” But building miles of new roads requires planning, land acquisition, and other lengthy steps that put fewer workers on the job immediately.

Mandel Ngan / Getty Images

The government, of course, meant to get the biggest bang for its buck. The stimulus bill forced states to spend their allocated cash quickly, which was intended to get them to fund maintenance needs—“shovel-ready projects”—that had already been identified. Building miles of new roads, on the other hand, requires planning, land acquisition, and other lengthy steps that put fewer workers on the job immediately.

Some states did that. Sue Minter, Vermont’s deputy transportation secretary, says a longstanding “fix-it-first” policy for infrastructure and bipartisan collaboration shaped Vermont’s decisions about how to use the funds. The state spent all of its highway money on system maintenance, with a small amount going to mass transit. (Minter, a Democrat, was a member of the state legislature at the time.) “This shot of money into our economy was very, very significant. It’s part of the reason we have a relatively low unemployment rate,” she says. Only 5.8 percent of Vermont residents are out of work, one of the nation’s lowest rates. State research shows that ARRA funding employed 11,000 people—a small number overall, but a significant one in a small state. Minter says the maintenance was important for keeping economic growth, particularly in tourism, strong.

Other states, however, took a different tack. Arkansas used 81 percent of its money for new projects and none on transit; it also has a higher unemployment rate than Vermont. And unlike other states near the bottom of the list, just 38 percent of its roads are in good condition, according to a report by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, a trade organization.

Yeah justin

Hoover is an economic god to you

And McCarthy was your hero

And Obama caused the recession

And doubling the DoD budget in recent years doesn't appear on your radar as you bemoan and whine about even the littlest of taxes.

And redirecting ANY money from wasteful programs to health reform, or instead washing it down the drain in a vast sea of DoD related spending and foreign wars is the death of us all.

And having the lowest taxes in the western world after we gave the wealthiest even more money (recent tax deal) to send overseas is just not good enough.

And you are smarter than Dr Reich and about 99% of economists who have concluded that hoover indeed was an economic dolt and ushered in the Great Depression and that FDR/WWII ended it.

You are naive to think the US will thrive in a laissez faire business model where taxes and gvmt regulation are a historic remnant. There's no historic precedent for your belief, and indeed, everytime we or anyone else have tried that, we have been predated on by the wealthy elite and suffered terrible economic shocks. And that includes the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and several shocks in the 19th century that few Americans have ever heard about except in vague terms of Robber Barons and the like.

Every time we lower taxes on the wealthy, almost half that money disappears into overseas investments or tax shelters. That's the giant sucking sound you hear, and msoja mistakenly believed was ACA.

I'm all for low taxes, but not for gutting them mindlessly. Clinton era high end tax rates were reasonable and helped balance the budget, and anything lower IMO is destructive to our economy and std of living.

I'm all for for smart elimination of regulation, but not for mindless gutting them.

As a 12 year USAF vet, I'm all for strong defense, but not the current wars and not the doubling of the DoD budget as BushJr did.

Evaluating whether a program has a NET negative or positive effect on the economy involves a fair assessment of all variables, something freeloaders like you aren't capable of doing. Some of the variables you enumerate would indeed be problems, except that you forgot to mention the variables in the package that outweigh your negatives. For example, ensuring that 32 million people have affordable care and won't go bankrupt or die are positive factors that HELP the economy and outweigh your variables.

And your blatant hatred of the CBO process also shows you are a wingnut whose opinions are distorted by ideology.

You fail to cite that GOP predictions are even worse than CBO predictions, and that the main reason CBO predictions are often wrong is that the underlying assumptions of those predictions change as a result of partisan actions by later Congresses and admins.

I am no longer a Republican because I came to learn that they engage in the biggest lies of all. You are the kind of propagandist that caused me to abandon that party--the party of debt, fear and big lies

bench craft company me

About Me 0060

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Making Money Without

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