Here's a novel idea for dealing with unemployment: Federal public works programs!
Congress would be wise to model a new job stimulus package after a proven program: the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the 1935 Roosevelt Depression brainchild that employed an estimated 10-million Americans building 850 airports, 110,000 libraries, schools, and hospitals, 500 water treatment plants, 78,000 bridges, and 8,000 parks. The WPA also employed writers and artists, many of whom painted murals in post offices, like the San Pedro post office on Beacon Street, where inside the Art Deco building of marble and chrome we find a WPA mural depicting the history of the harbor.
Obama’s first recovery plan, the American Reinvestment & Recovery Act, funded “shovel-ready” jobs: storm drain clean-up; energy retrofits; highway repairs.
President Obama’s second recovery plan must invest in future industries with large pay-offs in terms of career-path learning and earning opportunities in the Green economy. Put laid-off Boeing missile defense workers back on the job building electric buses for the future. Put college professors back to work in Green Energy Departments at universities across the country. Put steelworkers back to work strengthening our bridges in earthquake-prone California. Put everyone with a hard hat back to work building solar panel parts now outsourced to China.
Amen to that, and what better place and time for our President to issue this kind of challenge to the country and the Congress than a State of the Union address? Like, maybe the one that's scheduled next week?
For what it's worth, I can think of one excellent place to kick-start a massive public works project. In our current economic climate, the benefits are self-explanatory:
The statewide high-speed train project will require us to draw upon and expand California’s skilled workforce, creating nearly 160,000 construction-related jobs to plan, design and build the system. An additional 450,000 permanent jobs are expected to be created by 2035 as a result of the economic growth the train system will bring to California.
And as a special added bonus:
The high-speed train system would lower the number of intercity automobile passengers on highways by up to 70 million annually. What’s more, it will cost less than half the cost of expanding freeways and airports to meet future intercity travel demand and would eliminate the need to construct 3000 lane miles of highways, 91 airport gates and five additional airport runways.
But wait, there's more!
The system is projected to save 12.7 million barrels of oil per year by 2030, even with future improvements in auto fuel efficiency.
Electrically-powered high-speed trains reduce pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on fossil fuels. The total predicted emissions savings of the California high-speed train system is up to 12 billion pounds of CO2 per year by 2030 and would grow with higher ridership.
So, it's good for jobs, good for the environment, and good for infrastructure. So why should it take 25 years to build this damn thing?
Because as things stand now, the high-speed rail project is being primarily financed by 20-year transportation bonds, which (irony of ironies) are being issued by a state whose bond rating has been inelegantly but justly reduced to junk status. So if investors aren't wowed by our credit rating and don't snap up our bonds, then there's a shortfall of financing for the project, and besides, it'll cost the taxpayers more to borrow the money to float the bonds for those brave souls who'll trust us as long-term bondholders. (Bond issuances are a crazy way to fund these kinds of projects anyway, especially since you're talking about incurring some $45 billion in future debt for a state that's already $26 billion in the hole and which is furloughing workers, laying off teachers, raising tuitions, and shutting libraries and parks to pay down the deficit.)
So instead of limiting stimulus money to those so-called "shovel ready" projects, why not use the upcoming State of the Union to announce the inauguration of an Interstate Railway System? Along with a proposal for a down payment of $15 to $20 billion of seed money to get the ball rolling in California, accompanied by a challenge to the nation to finish the project within ten years' time? If we could send a man 250,000 miles to the moon within eight years, we sure as hell oughta be able to build a 350-mile bullet train line from LA to the East Bay within the same time frame.
Money? Washington deficit scolds notwithstanding, it's readily available---even if we don't end either of our stupid and costly Asian wars. To cite only one example, all we need to is solve this looming little problem, and there's plenty of money to go around for California's HSR program, and likely several others. The only thing that's truly missing is the vision to will this project, and others like it, into being. There's certainly no shortage of labor. Heck, even Third-World hellholes emerging nations are managing to pull it off, and here's how they're doing it:
Plenty more speedy lines are coming in China under an ambitious build-out initiated in 2006 by China's Ministry of Railways, and accelerated with government stimulus funds. A two-trillion-yuan ($293 billion) plan envisions 16,000 kilometers of dedicated high-speed rail lines connecting all of China's major cities by 2020. The first East-West segment--a link from Xi'an to Zhengzhou--could begin operating as early as this month, and work is underway to extend the Beijing-Tianjin line southward to Shanghai by 2012. WuGuang, meanwhile, is expected to expand northward to Beijing and South to Hong Kong by 2013. "Over the next five years there'll be more high-speed rail added in China than the rest of the world combined," says Keith Dierkx, director of IBM's Beijing-based Global Rail Innovation Center.
Americans have always loved things that go fast, and no small number of us have a longstanding love affair with train travel. We also simply have to be the fastest, baddest and bestest at everything we do---at least, we used to be that way---so I would think that this kind of project would be a relatively easy sell to taxpayers, as public-works programs go, on any number of levels.
Either way, it seems to me that now would be an excellent time to start holding Obama's feet to the fire on using the power of his prestige, and of his rhetoric, to lobby for this kind of stimulus. Hey, he did signal his support for this project in the early days of his administration, didn't he?
Meanwhile, if you want to help send a progressive Democrat to Congress who'll work to make programs like this a reality, click here. (H/t Digby.)
---
Vitelius