Have you written your Congressperson yet? How about your alder?
Appended below is a really good article that captures the flaws in
the stimulus bill. But I'd like to highlight this paragraph:
"In the current system, the federal government sends money to states
without any
real effort to evaluate whether it will pay for worthy projects. States rarely
do serious analyses of their own. They build new roads before fixing old ones.
They don't consider whether those new roads will lead to faster traffic or
simply more traffic....In the world of infrastructure, cost-
benefit analysis is still a science of the future."
This is something the rightists (who fancy themselves fiscal
conservatives) on the council should take note of. They have no proof
that their superhighway socialism is any better for business or job
creation than transit. None.
But, in fact, the data are in: Fixing existing roads generates 9%
more jobs than expanding them. Upgrading transit generates 19% more
jobs than expanding highways.
Leonhardt also has a good description of the disaster that is about
to befall transit systems across the country given the asinine false
dichotomy of capital v. operating budgets. Mayor Pave and his
superhighway sycophants on the council, led by Alders Mark Clear,
Julia Kerr & Co., have bought into this false dichotomy as they
actively seek to wreck Madison Metro with punitive bus fare increases
all in the name of saving a typical homeowner $2 a year.
Herbert Hoover made proud.
I just keep wondering when the westsiders will start holding their
representatives accountable.
-Mike Barrett
****************************************************************
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: January 27, 2009
WASHINGTON
How much of a difference will the stimulus make?
Two weeks ago, a Congressional committee posted a table of numbers on its Web
site that gave an early answer. The numbers came from the Congressional Budget
Office and seemed to show that only 38 percent of the money in the bill would
be spent by September 2010. That didn't sound very stimulating, and the numbers
soon caused a minor media sensation.
But anyone who looked closely would have seen something strange about the
table. It suggested that the bill would cost only $355 billion in all, rather
than its actual cost of about $800 billion.
Why? It turns out that the table was analyzing only certain parts of the bill,
like new spending on highways, education and energy. It ignored the tax cuts,
jobless benefits and Medicaid payments - the very money that will be spent the
fastest.
On Monday evening, the Congressional Budget Office put out its analysis of the
full bill, and it gave a very different picture. It estimated that about 64
percent of the money, or $526 billion, would be spent by next September.
That timetable may still be slower than ideal, and short of the 75 percent
benchmark President Obama has promised, but it isn't terrible. Spending
hundreds of billions of dollars takes time. In fact, for all the criticism the
stimulus package has been getting, it does pretty well by several important
yardsticks.
First of all, the package really is stimulus. It will quickly give money to the
people who have been hardest hit by the recession and who, not coincidentally,
will be most likely to spend that money soon. The spending also has a chance to
do some long-term good, by paying for the computerization of medical records,
the weatherization of homes and other such investments.
By my count, the current package has just one major flaw. It could do a lot
more to change how the government spends its money. It doesn't have nearly the
amount of the fresh, reformist thinking as Mr. Obama's campaign speeches and
proposals did. Instead, the bill is mostly a stew of spending on existing
programs, whatever their warts may be.
I understand that this approach reflects the realities of political
negotiations. It even has some economic merits: it may help speed the flow of
money out the door. But it still is a missed opportunity in a few instances.
The biggest is infrastructure. Transportation experts had hoped the package
would be the start of not only more spending on infrastructure but also smarter
spending on highways, mass transit, sewer systems and other public works. So
far, the experts are disappointed.
In the current system, the federal government sends money to states without any
real effort to evaluate whether it will pay for worthy projects. States rarely
do serious analyses of their own. They build new roads before fixing old ones.
They don't consider whether those new roads will lead to faster traffic or
simply more traffic. They spend millions of dollars on legislators' pet
projects and hulking new sports stadiums. In the world of infrastructure, cost-
benefit analysis is still a science of the future.
A couple of weeks ago, Ed Rendell, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania,
came to Washington to talk up infrastructure. He is a member of a tripartisan
threesome - along with Michael Bloomberg, New York's independent mayor, and
Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor - trying to persuade
the country to get serious about infrastructure.
In his talk, Mr. Rendell said he understood that the stimulus bill couldn't
come close to solving all these problems. But it could make some progress, and
Mr. Obama's sky-high approval ratings gave him a wonderful chance to do
so. "This is the time to put down some markers - this is the time," Mr. Rendell
said.
And the bill does include a couple of markers. It will list on the Web the
projects that the federal government is financing - an idea that, amazingly
enough, is considered radical - and will require that mayors and governors sign
off on projects. That will make it harder for them to lobby for projects now
and criticize those same projects later, as Gov. Sarah Palin did with the
Bridge to Nowhere. At least one version of the bill also sets aside $5.5
billion to be awarded by the transportation secretary, supposedly on the merits
of a project.
But it's not clear how that will work, and there is so much more that could be
done. The bill could create a small-scale version of an "infrastructure bank,"
a free-standing entity that could make more merit-based decisions than Congress
does (an idea that Mr. Obama supports). The bill could also finance the
creation of new state offices to conduct cost-benefit analyses. It could also
help cover the budget shortfalls of public transit systems, instead of simply
allocating another $30 billion for the construction of new highways.
Fifty-one transit systems have recently proposed service cuts or fare
increases, including those in Atlanta, Denver, New York, Phoenix, St. Louis,
San Diego and Washington. If these cuts go through, they will make it harder
for people to get to work (or look for work), and they will undermine one of
the long-term goals of the stimulus package: laying the groundwork for a
greener economy.
It's not just infrastructure, either. The bill includes big, admirable
increases in college financial aid - but appears likely to do little to use
those increases to improve higher education. The package will also sprinkle
millions of dollars on some debatable projects, like the renovation of the
National Mall.
The standard that I'm setting here may seem a bit high. Even with its current
flaws, the bill has much to recommend it. It will indeed try to encourage
significant changes in health care and K-12 education, for example.
The bill is certainly superior to a huge package of tax cuts, which might be
politically popular but end up in people's bank accounts rather than
stimulating the economy. By now, we should know that tax cuts are not a cure-
all. The cuts of 2001 and 2003 couldn't keep the recent expansion from being
one of the weakest on record or the current recession from being so deep.
This bill should help the economy in both the near term and the long term. But
the government doesn't go out and spend about $800 billion every day. The
details matter.
-----------------------------------------
Email: [email protected]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html
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