As Obama was about to take office, back in December '08, "infrastructure" was a major point of discussion when we anticipated what the new administration's priorities would be.
What will we get? ... [Now] the push for huge infrastructure spending and what we should be building. Where should we start, and what will it look like for the 21st century. You couldn't turn anywhere in the past week and not here "infrastructure" talk -- and most of all, at the big governors' conference in Philadelphia. Obama was there, Joe Biden was there saying the US needs to get going [and how] it's being left in the dust by competitors.
In other words, it was a hot topic and one which played into the need to get the economy going by reinvesting in what once were our greatest strengths.
David Leonhardt,business and economics reporter at the NYTimes, Robert Puentes of Brookings, and Jonathan David Miller, a consultant with the Urban Land Institute got together at NPR-Boston to discuss what we could expect from an infrastructure renewal project led by the new Obama administration.
Which areas will get the most attention? How will Congress react?
David Leonhardt: ...Obama has talked about this idea of setting up something called an infrastructure bank. In and of itself, it doesn't solve the problem but it actually has the potential to help. An infrastructure bank would finance infrastructure projects separately from the annual budgets of the government.
NPR: So it's a way to end-run Congress and put someone less political in charge?
David Leonhardt: That's not inherent in the idea. But the way Obama talks about it, he has suggested it would involve that. Not a bad model is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is a group of experts that Congress has set up. They were an act of Congress. But Congress doesn't control their individual decisions. I think it would be idea to see something similar for infrastructure in which Congress sets aside the money -- that's who controls the money in this country, Congress and the executive branch. And that's the way it needs to be. They're democratically accountable. But they're not making the individual decisions about whether to build a highway in western Pennsylvania that no one's ever going to use or whether to subsidize a sports stadium that really isn't a particularly good use of money. Instead what they're going to do is they are going to dedicate the money. And then you're going to have a group of people whose job it is to try to analyze which things actually make sense. And they have to report to the public. Ideally, you'd want something more open than the Federal Reserve. And it wouldn't be behind closed doors. But it also wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of politics in the way Congress is. To take one small example: we really need states and cities cooperating more than they do. So ideally what we would have is the federal government saying, "You know what? Maryland and Virginia and Washington DC, you're doing a great job of coordinating your highways and your mass transit and your light rail and all that. We're going to give you more money! New York, New Jersey and Connecticut? You're doing a bad job. You're each doing your own thing. You don't have any kind of integrated plan. We're not going to give you money."
The full discussion is available here.
