Here's a piece I ran into on the Journal of Commerce, a good transportation/logistics web site that's part of my new news crawl. It's a piece on infrastructure politics, but it's more politics than infrastructure, so I'll put my $0.02 here rather than over on the Momentum board.
The piece has the House Transportation Committee chair ripping the president a new one-
Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn., said Friday that President Obama was “massively uninformed” when the president told conferees at the White House jobs summit on Thursday that “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects may not provide the quick boost for jobs needed to stimulate American economic recovery.
“It was absolutely stunning to me,” Oberstar told The Journal of Commerce. Oberstar is the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. On Wednesday he took part in a press conference in which highway and transit officials presented a list of more than 9,500 infrastructure repair projects that could be started in 120 days or less.
He's right in that construction jobs like these have good multiplier effects and deliver about as good a bang for the stimulus buck as government spending goes. However, I'm not sure if I'm on board as he continues to rant-
Oberstar blamed Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, for the president’s opposition.
“This is the Larry Summers Effect at the White House,” Oberstar said. “This person does not understand, nor believe in, nor read figures of success in the infrastructure program.”
I'm not sure who made Summers the whipping boy; there's even a Fire Summers blog going. News that Harvard's endowment fund got trashed when Summers had them long on stocks when the market crashed has made him look not so good, but that's a solid strategy to have for the long haul.
If anything, Summers is getting both barrels from some quarters because he understands economics; they don't hand out PhD's in econ to doofuses. The problem for liberals is that he is rather pragmatic and moderate, being more of a deficit hawk than most Democrats.

Recent Comments