National parks getting $750 million
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
National parks got $750 million in federal economic stimulus Wednesday to chip into a to-do list that includes repairing historic buildings, constructing trails and increasing renewable energy use from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to Yosemite in California.
"This is probably the most significant investment made in more than a generation," Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in an interview before the Earth Day announcement.
FIND: National Park Service projects near you
More than 750 projects in 48 states are expected to create 30,000 to 40,000 jobs starting this summer. That includes 15,000 jobs in a proposed 21st Century Youth Conservation Corps.
Though smaller in scale than the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps, which opened camps for young men who built trails and campgrounds still in use, Salazar says the Depression program is an inspiration to "resurrect the treasures of America."
No projects are in Delaware, which has no national parks, or Rhode Island, which Salazar's press secretary, Kendra Barkoff, says has no "shovel-ready" projects.
The stimulus funds won't clear the National Park Service's $9 billion maintenance backlog, says spokesman David Barna, but they will pay for long-deferred projects at many iconic sites:
•Independence Hall, birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, will get nearly $5.5 million to repair its crumbling tower and replace a weathervane, clocks and masonry.
•Ellis Island in New York Harbor will get $26.1 million to repair a sea wall and stabilize the 1908 baggage and dormitory building.
•The Old Courthouse in St. Louis will get nearly $5 million to replace a leaky roof that has damaged seven rooms. The site of the pivotal Dred Scott slavery trial that hastened the Civil War is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and "almost as much of an icon as the Gateway Arch itself," park Superintendent Tom Bradley says.
•Shenandoah National Park in Virginia will get nearly $9.5 million to reconstruct stone walls and wood guardrails at 16 overlooks.
The stimulus package includes $14 million for solar panels at 26 national parks. Yosemite expects its $5.6 million project to pare electricity costs 10%. Zion National Park in Utah will get 20% of its power from solar energy once panels are installed.
Big Bend in Texas, Glacier in Montana, Grand Canyon in Arizona and Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., are among parks slated for trail repair. Yellowstone in Wyoming will get a new wastewater treatment plant. Old mines will be restored at Colorado's Great Sand Dunes and California's Death Valley.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-04-22-national-parks_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
Sad to know that NONE of the 15 Republican Congressmen who represent us in Washington DC voted for the stimulus package! I guess investing in our future, and into the environment is not a priority for them :o
Thanks to the very young or yet to be born taxpayers who will be picking up the stimulus and bailout tabs.
Quote from: urbanlibertarian on April 22, 2009, 09:18:44 PM
Thanks to the very young or yet to be born taxpayers who will be picking up the stimulus and bailout tabs.
I guess if we lived in a Banana Republic we wouldn't have a need for roads, National Parks and such. Zero taxes if you want to live without the civilization our taxes pay for.
The current recession will likely be long gone before this money gets spent. That means it will probably have an inflationary effect on prices and the government borrowing will have an inflationary effect on interest rates. The spending will buy votes not prosperity.
Quote from: urbanlibertarian on April 22, 2009, 10:10:45 PM
The current recession will likely be long gone before this money gets spent. That means it will probably have an inflationary effect on prices and the government borrowing will have an inflationary effect on interest rates. The spending will buy votes not prosperity.
Though you are right, that the spending should be fast, hence the terrn "shovel-ready" for spending programs that are to benefit from the stimulus funds,....... the spending itself actually does have a multiplier effect on the economy ( GDP), and much more so than any tax cuts could have:
QuoteAccording to a Jan. 6 study by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com, GDP grows by $1.59 for every dollar spent on infrastructure, while the increase from a corporate tax cut is only $0.30.
"The mix between spending increases and tax cuts is roughly right," Zandi says. "Spending packs a bigger economic punch, but tax cuts are helpful because even though they're not as economically efficacious, they do work more quickly."
Based on Zandi's study, some of the most efficient ways to spend government money are temporarily increasing food stamps (a $1.73 GDP increase per dollar), extending unemployment benefits ($1.63), increasing infrastructure spending ($1.59) and upping direct aid to financially strapped states ($1.38).
The draft bill reflects that emphasis on spending. The approximately $550 billion in government spending includes: $159 billion to education; $154.5 billion for health care; $92 billion to infrastructure; $58 billion to investments in energy; $71.5 billion in aid to the poor and unemployed; and billions more to science, technology and housing.
...or ease the tax burden
Still, tax cuts can work quickly get bipartisan support among lawmakers, and the current bill contains $275 billion in breaks for business and individuals. For companies, cuts include savings on capital investment and past profits; individuals will likely get $500 of relief ($1,000 for families), a $2,500 college tuition tax credit, and home-buyers will owe less.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/16/news/economy/stimulus_howto.fortune/
Except for infrastructure spending most of the spending will be paid out within the first 18 months, see bar graph:
http://www.usbudgetwatch.org/files/crfb/StimulusAnalysis_1.pdf
Whenever anyone makes a budget, there are choices on what to spend the money. Government decides to spend on highways, armies, coastal armoring, Social security, whatever.
I am glad that one of the choices includes restoration and preservation of national parkland.Whenever I visit Florida parks or National parks that have structures, roads, forests built and planted by the CCC in the 1930s, I am grateful to that program and the lasting work of the many men during those years of economic depression.
QuoteSad to know that NONE of the 15 Republican Congressmen who represent us in Washington DC voted for the stimulus package! I guess investing in our future, and into the environment is not a priority for them
What is really sad is that they could not vote for the stimulus because of all the pork and non shovel ready non stimulus spending was included. I am sure if the bill was whether or not to fund these programs on their merit alone they would have garnered more votes... :)
I wonder if those 15 Republican Congressmen have voted against any infrastructure spending in Iraq. We certainly have had plenty of money to destroy Iraq, rebuild Iraq, watch others destroy Iraq and then have the USA pay to rebuild it again. Apparently pork spending is ok as long as it isn't on U.S. citizens.
Faye, most of the spending is set to spend later so that it is timed in an election season - pork = votes.
Less than 5% of the stimulus is on infrastructure (as we define it - roads, bridges, etc.). The $$ is better spent by the people who earned it - the taxpayer. The taxpayer will create the demand for the projects that are needed.
Just as you say that we can't drill our way to prosperity, the government can't spend our way to prosperity either.
And while you say that there is tax "cuts", they are actually tax "credits" and there is a difference.
This debt will have to be paid back. We are going to have some great parks after all of this is spent, but after your taxes skyrocket, you won't be able to afford to go enjoy them. ;)
Quote from: Sigma on April 23, 2009, 09:37:02 AM
Faye, most of the spending is set to spend later so that it is timed in an election season - pork = votes.
Less than 5% of the stimulus is on infrastructure (as we define it - roads, bridges, etc.). The $$ is better spent by the people who earned it - the taxpayer. The taxpayer will create the demand for the projects that are needed.
Just as you say that we can't drill our way to prosperity, the government can't spend our way to prosperity either.
And while you say that there is tax "cuts", they are actually tax "credits" and there is a difference.
This debt will have to be paid back. We are going to have some great parks after all of this is spent, but after your taxes skyrocket, you won't be able to afford to go enjoy them. ;)
Infrastructure spending will be delayed, but since its only 5% of stimulus spending, its impact to revive the economy is minimal. However if you had looked at the bargraph in the link I provided, about 57-80% of other spending categories will be spent within the first 18 months, hence their stimulative effect.
The largest tax cuts for the middle-class went into effect in people's last pay-check, where their take-home pay was increased,........that's an immediate effect.
Delayed spending pro-longed Japan's recovery in the 90's, leading to a lost decade. Certainly we wouldn't want that to happen in the US.
Since Republicans limit themselves to tax cut policies, I am glad we have Democrats at the helm using spending with its great multiplier effect to shorten the free-fall stage we've been in.
I heard somewhere yesterday that the overall carbon output in the U.S. during the GWB era actually went down more than it did in the EU, which is bound by Kyoto, during the same period.
Found that fascinating and worth a middle finger to the "all Republicans/conservatives are evil" crowd. Trying to find that in writing.
Recycling Discredited Ideas
By Peter Lewin • April 2009
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
â€"John Maynard Keynes, 1936.
Unless they have taken a course in economics most people probably have never heard the name John Maynard Keynes. To his contemporaries this English economist, statesman, and general all-around charismatic intellectual was a household name. And to generations of economics students after World War II, he was a hero.
He was the man who invented macroeconomics, the man who revealed to the world how to avoid another Great Depression, the man who made it respectable for governments to target unemployment and to worry about balancing the economy, not the budget. He taught us that it is unnecessary to worry about the long run because “in the long run we are all dead.†He taught us that government leadership was necessary to safeguard us from the possible and likely instabilities of the market system. Capitalism was ok. It was the best system we had to ensure economic growth peacefully and democratically. But it needed to be bolstered by enlightened governmental intervention at crucial moments. Most of this came packaged in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936. It became the basis of the new conventional wisdom.
Teaching a New Generation Old Tricks
To be sure, Keynesian ideas were around before Keynesâ€"but they were mostly associated with quacks and crackpots. Economists before Keynes dismissed the idea that governments could “create jobs†by simply putting people to work on “public works†using money created by the central bank (inflation). After all, if resources were employed in public works they would be unavailable for anything else. Society would have to forgo the alternative product of these resourcesâ€"that was their opportunity cost. Governments could not simply “create†jobs where none existed before. They could only redistribute jobs away from the private sector into the public sector. And there was no reason to presume that the latter jobs were more valuable to society than the former. An understanding of economic history and of the market process suggested the oppositeâ€"namely, that private market decisions in pursuit of profit would tend to produce the most valuable jobs for the most people.
Keynes secured acceptance for his ideas because of who he was, when he was, and what he was. He was a very powerful personality (to say the least) who came to prominence at the time of the worst economic depression the world had ever faced. He was also the head of the most prestigious university economics department (Cambridge) in the world. He was uniquely placed to take these hitherto dismissed ideas and not only make them respectable but present them as the new revealed truth.
Keynes packaged these ideas in convoluted intellectual garb but he asked some legitimate, penetrating, hard-to-answer questions about how the market works. He suggested that the “dark forces of time and ignorance†made it implausible to suppose that private, mortal entrepreneurs could be relied on to anticipate the future demand for goods and services in any detail. This being the case, Keynes asked, how can we rely on the market to put to work the savings of millions of private individuals? Savings is the sacrifice of present consumption spending for the option to consume in the future. But what guarantee is there that increased saving today could and would be translated into increased consumption tomorrow? After all, increased saving today means less consumption today, and this is likely to discourage entrepreneurs from producing for the future. This is why we need the government to undergird the economy and prevent it from falling into a downward spiral due to the pessimism that could arise from underconsumption (however caused). In a modern monetary economy, private savings do not automatically get translated into private investment. Thus private investment needs to be supplemented and nudged by government investmentâ€"and if necessary, it would seem, also by government consumption.
Blasphemy from Chicago and Austria
The Keynesian message is appealing and intuitive, and it has sold very well. In fact, it testifies to the power of ideas in history. In the postwar period first the academic economists, then the other social scientists, and then the public at large became converts. From the time of John Kennedy onwards American economic policy became self-consciously Keynesian. But there were pockets of strenuous resistance to the new creedâ€"most notably at the University of Chicago (the economists of the Chicago School) and also among many individual economists around the worldâ€"notably those trained in the Austrian school of economics. The most prominent Austrians of that period were Ludwig von Mises (then at New York University) and Friedrich Hayek (at the London School of Economics and later at the University of Chicago). The most famous Chicago economist in this context was Milton Friedmanâ€"perhaps America’s most well-known economist ever. It was Friedman’s relentless work (together with his students and colleagues) that paved the way for a sober reconsideration of the new Keynesian orthodoxy and its subsequent overthrow.
My own personal odyssey coincided with that broader cultural shift. I arrived at the University of Chicago in September 1972 to pursue my Ph.D. in economics as an informed and enthusiastic Keynesian. This despite studying in South Africa under Ludwig Lachmann, an adherent to the Austrian School, and in spite of a detailed knowledge of Milton Friedman’s monetary theory. Between 1972 and 1976, while I was immersed in a detailed and rigorous examination of market economics, the American economy was being put to the test. Friedman had long been preaching against Keynesian macroeconomic policies (tax, inflate, and spend) and in his presidential address to the American Economic Association (1968) had warned that such policies would lead ultimately to simultaneous inflation and unemployment. By the mid-to-late 1970s this is exactly what happenedâ€"a new American word, stagflation, was coined to describe it. High levels of both inflation and unemployment emerged, seemingly impervious to the stimulatory actions of government economic policy.
In fact, people now began to suspect what Friedman (and Mises and Hayek and countless others) had been saying for yearsâ€"that government policy was responsible for the mess, that government policy, far from being the solution, was itself the problemâ€"could be true. People began to suspect that the pre-Keynesian economists were right in thinking that the market was not inherently unstable (as Keynes has asserted) and that government intervention to improve on market outcomes actually succeeded in destabilizing the market much further. By the end of the 1970s people were ready for a change. It was in this climate of opinion that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were elected. When I left Chicago in 1976 I was convinced that Keynesian economics was a fraud, and I have never seen reason to change my mind. I naively thought that my own passage from illusion to enlightenment was characteristic of the public in general and that Keynesianism (at least in its naive form) had been put to bed forever. I had thought that we now understood that inflation and unemployment were not alternatives and that any temporary stimulus achieved by money inflation would be short-lived and would itself cause a boom-bust cycle. The Keynesians had scrambled to put together an even more convoluted version of the story, but I had thought their efforts were basically seen as unsuccessfulâ€"at very least by the majority of trained economists.
Don’t Call it a Comeback
Clearly not. The current financial crisis has fueled a frenzied recycling of discredited Keynesian ideas. We are hearing again of the need for “public works,†of the need to “stimulate†the economy. The Federal Reserve is frantically inflating the supply of money. We are laying the groundwork for a disaster reminiscent of the 1970sâ€"if not worse.
To understand this we need to look at some of the details of the current crisis. The conventional wisdom blames our plight on an over-reliance on the free market, on “too much deregulation.†The truth is exactly the opposite. The current debacle is the result of multiple overreaching government regulations and interventions. At the very base of the problem is the Federal Reserve, which has attempted to fine-tune the economy and guide it delicately through ups and downs. The Fed has always been reluctant to be the party pooper that brings any boom to an end. Thus the “natural†end of the dot-com boom was postponed by a reluctance of the Fed to allow interest rates to rise, thus allowing the supply of money to expand to fuel the necessary credit for continued expansion into ever more risky and unsustainable business ventures. When the bust came it came with more pain than necessary. The related housing bubble that followed played out along similar lines.
But the matter is more complicated than simply too much credit for overexpanding sectors of the economy. The housing crisis is the result of a systematic, hardheaded social policy aimed at increasing the number of homeowners in America. Using the politically charged notion that minorities were suffering from discrimination in the mortgage industry (a notion that has been discredited; see, for example, Stan Liebowitz, “A Study that Deserves No Credit,†Wall Street Journal, September 1, 1993, http://tinyurl.com/8bsjb3 [pdf]), some Democratic politicians made it their mission to rewrite the standards for mortgage approvals and ensure they became the reigning procedures for the industry. In this they were assisted by the quasi-government mortgage-packaging institutions, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. The result was a massive expansion of the production of new houses, an increase in housing prices, and an increase in the proportion of Americans owning their own homes.
The rise in housing prices in turn encouraged creative speculation in financial securitization based on mortgages. It also encouraged speculation in home ownership whereby, with very little or no money down, people could buy multiple homes and profit from the run-up in prices. When housing prices finally started to fallâ€"an inevitable outcomeâ€"many people found themselves owing more than the houses were worth and simply walked away from them. Others found themselves facing mortgage payments they could not affordâ€"because of the systematic dumbing-down of mortgage standards. (For a comprehensive, penetrating examination, see Stan Liebowitz, “Anatomy of a Trainwreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown,†http://tinyurl.com/3m4bzv [pdf].)
In short, we have had a distortion of the economic structure toward the production of items whose value did not justify their production in the first place. This is a structure that cannot be sustained. Resources are “misemployed†and need to be redeployedâ€"a process that is necessarily painful. (The same story characterizes the travails of the auto industry over a much longer period.)
Pay Now or Pay More Later
Against this background one can see that attempts to solve the crisis by simply providing more liquidity or “stimulating†the economy won’t work. In fact they will make things worse by creating the illusion that the distorted production structure can be preserved. We have a choice: pay now or pay more later. The Obama administration came into office talking about a nearly $800 billion program, in addition to the $700 billion already available for bailouts and mortgage cleanup, to stimulate consumption. This presumably was in anticipation of a precipitous fall in consumption spendingâ€"reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930sâ€"that was expected to result from massive capital losses produced by the financial and housing price meltdowns. As bad as things are now, we are as yet nowhere near the situation of the Great Depression, and one hopes we never will be.
This massive expansion of money is occurring at a time of great uncertainty. So the money is not circulating through the economy very rapidly (as people are reluctant to lend and even to borrow). The time will come, however, in the not-too-distant future when this excess liquidity will inevitably result in general price inflation and all the negative side effects that this always brings.
The stimulus package and the other varied and unpredictable government initiatives that we have witnessed recentlyâ€"like the “bailout†of Citigroup and AIGâ€"are unlikely to do any good at all, except for those who are directly subsidized by these actions at the taxpayers’ expense. We know from the logic of basic economics and from history that such initiatives are unlikely to work. And we know that, at very best, they will postpone the necessary reallocation of resources that must take place before the economy can recover. Most likely they will seriously exacerbate the misallocation of resources and make the recovery ultimately more difficult.
What is most alarming to me personally is the enthusiastic recyclingâ€"indeed apparent wholesale resuscitationâ€"of discredited Keynesian ideas. The false prophet of the public purse is back.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/recycling-discredited-ideas/
So basically, that scene from Back to the Future II (there I go referencing that movie again) where Marty goes to order a Pepsi with a $50 bill is on the horizon after all! Yay!
Florida members tout Glades dollars
Florida's Everglades stands to gain $96 million out of the federal stimulus bill -- following a full-court press by Florida's congressional delegation.
The money will pay for a number of Everglades restoration projects and is a significant investment for the federal government which has lagged behind its state partner.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Florida lawmakers "pushed very hard'' because they were
concerned the Everglades wouldn't be at the top of the US Army Corps of Engineers priority list.
"We definitely made it extremely clear to the Army Corps that we wanted them to prioritize," she said. "You have all these projects that will move forward, that fit the definition of creating shovel ready jobs,. And you will be able to see the federal government finally infuse a significant amount of money into the Everglades and become a full partner with the state, which should have been the case all along.''
http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2009/04/florida-members-tout-glades-dollars-.html
Sigma, regarding
failed Friedman economics, here is an analysis by
Richard A Posner, who has been a long time federal judge â€" in fact the first judge appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1981. Even before Robert Bork and Scalia.
Quoteit is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold:
the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives;
the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming,
the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials,
the neglect of management and expertise in government;
a continued preoccupation with abortion;
and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives' bête noire.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/05/is_the_conserva.html
To make it easier to read, here are his words regarding the economy separated out
QuoteAnd then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning:
1. the business cycle;
2. macroeconomy generally;
3. Friedmanite monetarism;
4. and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits.
Quoteand fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
Party affiliation does not seem to alter some things...
QuoteParty affiliation does not seem to alter some things...
Nope, the party in power wins if the people are happy with the size of their wallets! Otherwise, its time for a new team.
The National Parks: America's Best Idea
Coming to PBS September 27, 2009. Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales â€" from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska â€"
The National Parks: America's Best Idea is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background â€" rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists and entrepreneurs; people who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. It is a story full of struggle and conflict, high ideals and crass opportunism, stirring adventure and enduring inspiration - set against the most breathtaking backdrops imaginable.
The National Parks: America's Best Idea is a six-episode series directed by Ken Burns and written and co-produced by Dayton Duncan.
http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/