President-elect, Barack Obama's Infrastructure Plan Good for America! (solutions, compared, rating)

[Lincolnian]

The President-elect, Barack Obama's plan for rebuilding America's infrastructure can be the race to the moon of the early part of the 21st-Century.

See New England Opinion Blog: President-elect Barack Obama's Infrastructure Plan is Good for America for more of my opinion.

[harborlady]

Good to see you back Linc. I'm hopeful too. He couldn't possibly do worse than this last clown and it looks like that message of hope came on time.

Great Depression Not Imminent, But Inevitable - Seeking Alpha
What a mess!

[evilnewbie]

What a stupid blog... it says its good for America and doesn't even explain HOW? Every new road you build, you have to have a PERMANENT source of INCREASED funding to maintain it (i.e. higher property taxes)... will it create jobs? Short-term, yes... Long term, no... that isn't a "fix" for anything... at best its a "patch" and not a very good one at that... at least the infrastructure that needs to be repaired will be better but instead of focusing on fake solutions, he should be concentrating on a solution that will last longer than his presidency... do we need better infrastructure... yes... do we need to focus narrowly on overcoming the nation's problems based on better infrastructure? You got to be kidding me... Infrastructure isn't what is destroying America... improving it is at best a distraction...

[2nd trick op]

You don't rebuild after a disaster by dreaming up some huge centralized plan and forcing it upon the people viewed from inside the Beltway as an ingnorant peasantry; that was tried back in the Thirties as the Nstional Recovery Administration and, thankfully, a vigilant Supreme Court prevented it. With the Lefties intent upon packing the Court with rubber-stamping mediocrities, we might not be so fortunate this time around.

If you know where to look, for example, a new surface transportation network, both freight and passenger, is evolving here and there, driven mostly single aduts, usually a the two ends of the age spectrum, and by shipppers who replaced the term "traffic management" with "logistics" or "distribution".

I know there are people out there just itching for another power grab; please stay out of the way and let the markets do what they're naturally going to do via the simple interplay of supply and demand.

[dman72]

Originally Posted by 2nd trick op

You don't rebuild after a disaster by dreaming up some huge centralized plan and forcin the people viewd from inside the Beltway as an ingnorant peasantry; that was tried back in the Thirties as the Nstional Recovery Administration and, thankfully, a vigilant Supreme Court prevented it. Whit the Lefties packing the Court with rubber-stamping nediocrities, we might not be so fortunate this time around.

Good job responding 4 years later.

[2nd trick op]

Originally Posted by dman72

Good job responding 4 years later.

Some of us have been responding for a lot longer than four years; just not at C-D.

RAILROAD.NET • Index page

Speaking more seriously for a moment, the interface between transportaion and statecraft, particlarly with regard to the "nuts and bolts", is not addressed with much enthusiasm by an increasingly sensitized and feminized media obsessed with the short-term and the sensation-prone.

The Adninistration's much-ballyhooed High Speed Rail (HSR) fantasy from the last inaugural dream-fest is best compared to the shiny Lionel set in the store window -- beyond the fiscal reach of a contracting economy. But California has moved, of necessity very slowly, in a direction of putting together something that would fit -- after a lot of wrangling -- and in the same manner as what started on the East Coast fifty years ago; that's sometimes how it goes in the world of realpolitik.