Obama Plans Largest Building Program Since 1950s

[tufsu1]

why won't Obama's ideas stimulate economic activity?

Charlie Crist is requesting $7 billion in transportation/infrastructure funding....and he says that will create around 200,000 new jobs!

[Ocklawaha]

Such a deal...

1.  Crist (from St. Pete) + FDOT = Massive road building projects
2.  Peyton + JTA = Massive road building projects
3.  Diaz + Miami = Streetcar - Commuter Rail - DPM - Heavy Rail - BRT - Road Improvements

Q - Which one is from a world class city?

OCKLAWAHA

[thelakelander]

Does anyone have a link to the State's list?  I'm finding bits and pieces from certain cities, but no major list.  Its interesting to see what different places have as their priorities.  For example, Lakeland wants to spend $124 million to build energy-efficient schools along with 52 hybrid and 52 low-emission liquid propane buses.  I wonder what's the State's priorities for Florida's major metropolitan areas?

[RiversideGator]

why won't Obama's ideas stimulate economic activity?

Charlie Crist is requesting $7 billion in transportation/infrastructure funding....and he says that will create around 200,000 new jobs!

He is wrong too.  This just goes to show that Crist is not a conservative.

[RiversideGator]

BTW, this "solution" has been tried before in Japan.  It did not work there to stimulate the economy either.  Note that I am not saying that reasonable infrastructure spending is not bad, just that it is not effective at stimulating the economy and that other methods are far more effective although not consistent with Democrat Party dogma.  Read more here about Japan's experience:

The Perils of a Cement Tsunami
   
By Amity Shlaes
Wednesday, December 10, 2008; Page A25

President-elect Barack Obama put forward a plan this week for the largest government infrastructure project in a half-century. The idea is to revive the economy and create jobs for America's unemployed. But huge public works projects often fail to revive national economies. Consider the example of Japan in the 1990s.

The situation in Japan then was similar in some ways to that in the United States today. A dramatic market crash and a plunge in real estate prices shook what had been a confident nation. Japan turned inward; economists talked earnestly about paradigm shifts. The obsession with exporting no longer seemed to be serving the country well. Leaders cast aside their previous concerns about budget deficits. The then-Ministry of International Trade and Industry sorrowfully let it be known that there were "areas in which Japan lags behind major developed nations."

One such area was infrastructure -- even though Japan is so often rocked by earthquakes that it tends to operate in Katrina mode: always fortifying for a meteorological or geological crisis. The central and local governments began spending billions of yen on construction. In short, Japan traded its export complex for an edifice complex.

The projects were similar to some infrastructure plans under discussion here today. Bridges? Japan put up the longest suspension bridge in the world. Airports? Kansai International, yes, on an artificial island, but also local fields such as Ibaraki Airport near Mito. Roads? Japan built new streets and highways, including the famous New Tomei Expressway. For biotech and telecommunications, Japan poured out the subsidies.

When one plan proved insufficient, another was begun. In 1999, Japan announced a scheme to create 700,000 jobs, much as Obama recently announced a plan to create or save 2.5 million jobs. As with the U.S. example, politicians were precise about the number of new jobs . . . and less precise about their cost. Between 1992 and 2000, the Japanese launched 10 stimulus packages that included public works. The Land of the Rising Sun became the Construction State. Other worthy issues, such as consistent tax reform, lagged. In fact, fiscal reform overall was postponed. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake claimed thousands of lives, the focus on infrastructure was reinforced.

Some of these projects were valuable, some risible. As Bloomberg News recently reported, Japan Airlines Corp. and All Nippon Airways, which run nearly all flights within Japan, don't even expect to fly to the Ibaraki Airport. With the Japanese turning to trains, the New Tomei Expressway seemed a waste.

The spending yielded painfully little for the rest of the economy. The Nikkei stayed down. The country's standard of living failed to keep pace with the rest of the world's. The average Japanese's purchasing power had been moving closer to that of the average American, Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation has noted. But in the 1990s the Japanese saw few advances. The gap between America and Japan widened again.

"The construction state is in some respects akin to the military-industrial complex in cold-war America (or the Soviet Union), sucking in the country's wealth, consuming it inefficiently, growing like a cancer and bequeathing both fiscal crisis and environmental devastation," commented Gavan McCormack, a professor at the Australian National University. The stimulus plans had the opposite effect of what was expected. Appalled at the country's new deficits, Japanese consumers closed their wallets.

Worst, though, was the failure on jobs. Unemployment fell in many nations in the 1990s. In Japan, the '90s were a lost decade: The unemployment rate more than doubled and surpassed the U.S. rate -- an unthinkable occurrence just a few years earlier.

Even today, Japan is having trouble climbing out of its cement pit. At its high, in the mid-1990s, infrastructure spending accounted for 6 percent of its gross domestic product, double what the United States allocated for infrastructure in the '90s and still higher than what politicians are considering spending today. In estimates of national debt, the world's second-largest national economy is near the top of the list, perched between Lebanon and Jamaica. Last year, Japan's public debt was far greater than the size of its economy, a burden that makes its demographic challenges more difficult to address.

What lessons should the United States take away? It is wrong to assume that construction will guarantee a two-fer for the economy -- shining structures and redemptive growth. The private sector is often better than politicians at guessing what the market needs. And infrastructure projects demand so much political energy that there's too little energy left over for everything else. Congress might want to remember all this as it debates infrastructure funding in the coming months. An edifice complex seems more likely to petrify a country than to move it forward.

Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Forgotten Man," a history of the 1930s.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/09/AR2008120902785.html

[tufsu1]

Such a deal...

1.  Crist (from St. Pete) + FDOT = Massive road building projects
2.  Peyton + JTA = Massive road building projects
3.  Diaz + Miami = Streetcar - Commuter Rail - DPM - Heavy Rail - BRT - Road Improvements

Q - Which one is from a world class city?

OCKLAWAHA

really...none of the above!

[tufsu1]

The $7 billion referenced by Crist is from AASHTO...here is the press release

http://news.transportation.org/press_release.aspx?Action=ViewNews&NewsID=202

their website might have the survey detail itself.

BTW....take note of the footnote at the bottom that says every $1.25 billion in spending creates 35,000 jobs....that's from FHWA...so extrapolated for Florida, that would be 196,000 jobs.

Sorry River...But I trust FHWA and AASHTO a lot more than you on the relationship between transportation construction and jobs!

[thelakelander]

Thanks for the link.  The only rail project for Florida is $26 million for Miami's Intermodal Center.  I wonder why JTA's Transportation Center is not on the list?  have we already secured all the funding needed?

[thelakelander]

The states requesting the most rail money are:

$327,000,000  Illinois
$312,200,000  California (includes 10,000,000 for Amtrak's capital Corridor)
$220,750,000  North Carolina
$137,485,000  Wisconsin
$121,700,000  Washington
$110,000,000  Louisiana (a rail line between Baton Rouge and New Orleans)

http://www.s4prc.org/inthenews/2008news/stimulus_2.pdf

[vicupstate]

Thats going to be a major problem with this stimulas package.  By the time the design gets done, all the environmental objections and requirements are met, and contracts actually let it will be at best a year before this gets started.  Who knows what the economy may be like then, the whole package may not be required.

From what I have read, the emphasis will be on shovel-ready projects (ie only the funding is lacking, not the design, or approvals).  Also, states that don't spend the money within a period of time will lose it.  Of course, all of that can be easier said than done. 

[tufsu1]

From an article I read on the # of ready-to-go projects for the stimulus....this has been presented by the Governors to Obama last week, and does include Florida.

"Transit officials have identified 736 ready-to-go projects nationwide, valued at $12.2 billion, that would create more than 40,000 jobs if federal money is made available"

The question....Is there anything on the list from JTA?

[BridgeTroll]

I think Ock posted them here...

http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,4042.msg60561.html#msg60561

[alta]

JTA is listed under
BRT - Waste of tax payer dollars
Ridership - Reference the average JTA ridership projection/.25= actual riders
Transit Oriented Development- Hotel by transit funded parking garage
Current Mass Transit -  Mostly empty buses that cause more traffic congestion by stopping every two blocks than they relieve by transporting people that don't have cars.

[jaxtrader]

I'm amazed that so much of the MSM seems to regard this plan as a panacaea. I would remind readers that the Japanese spent the better part of the 1990's paving their island to the point there is scarcely a blade of grass remaining. All they have to show for their efforts are a lot proverbial bridges to nowhere and a crippling public debt (around 140% of GDP, or roughly twice as large as US public debt). I'm not opposed to well-thought out infrastructure projects...I just think expectations are way too high.

[RiversideGator]

BTW....take note of the footnote at the bottom that says every $1.25 billion in spending creates 35,000 jobs....that's from FHWA...so extrapolated for Florida, that would be 196,000 jobs.

Sorry River...But I trust FHWA and  a lot more than you on the relationship between transportation construction and jobs!

I did not say that spending massive sums of money we do not have on make work projects would not produce some jobs.  What I said was that these would be created at the expense of other private sector jobs which would be lost or never created as a consequence.  So, there is no net benefit from this and there are plenty of net losses in terms of lost opportunity for the private sector, lost tax revenue from the missing economic activity and more government debt.  Did you read the article I posted above?  One needs only to look at Japan in the 1990s for a recent case study in how this tactic does not work to revive the economy.

BTW, for those who dont know, the FHWA is the Federal Highway Administration and the AASHTO is the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  These are nothing more than government bureaucrats and their hanger ons.  Might their data be a bit skewed and self-serving?  Are you really so naive as to take their word for it?