The effectiveness of this gambit was aided in the fact that there was no single major project or even groups of projects that Americans could see and be inspired by. We had no massive long term projects like those of the New Deal to hang the hat of low information voters on. We had no Rural Electrification program, no Conservation Corps that could put people to work and see real results.
It is not that an overarching project would have put money into the economy faster. In fact anything short of direct hiring by the Federal Government really would not do that. Still to have a project that could inspire, that could be pointed to as Americans coming together in a time of trouble would have made it much easier for everyone to accept that the money being spent was having a positive impact.
It is not too late for such a measure. While there is a lot of political weakness in the Democrats in Congress (really that should be in the Senate, the House has done yeoman's work these last two years) a big idea is something that Americans can't resist. The good news is there is a big idea that can be polished up and really invested in. National High Speed Rail.
About 1% of the American Recovery Act was allocated for high speed rail. The problem is that the 8 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 500 billion needed to establish a full scale high speed rail system. It focuses on too much on passenger transport and not enough on cargo transport. This small amount of money also means that it is a state by state or at best regional issue not a national one that can inspire people and produce decades of good jobs.
Major national projects like this do not really pay fast dividends when we are talking about economic stimulus. Still they do set the stage for economic growth long term and can serve as point of pride to unite the people. It took a total of 50 years of investment to complete the Interstate Highway system. Those decades of construction required heavy equipment, materials and workers to do the actual building. It linked the nation in ways it had not been linked before. While there was an associated blight in terms of sprawl the initial idea was a good one that spread the wealth to every state in the nation.
We need high speed freight and passenger service. The cost of continually moving freight over highways is just too high. The cost of maintaining the roads, the cost of fuel that can only be satisfied from foreign sources, the cost of lives from the inevitable accidents with 80,000 pound trucks, and the environmental cost of billions of gallons of fuel being burned daily are all too high to continue.
A national decades long initiative to bring high speed rail coast to coast is the kind of spending that the American people can get behind. It gives us a vision of the United States as nation on the move again, a nation that can still do great and impressive things. It also gives us the chance to revive the steel industry, the construction industry, the heavy equipment industry and the high tech heavy engineering industry. This kind of program would require the nation getting back to what made it great, the production of real things by real workers.
The follow on prosperity this kind of project would bring would do a lot to take the nation out of a service economy and put it back into a goods economy. This is where real prosperity lies, in having a nation where people can work, sometime really hard work, but solid honest work, and raise a family. Have opportunities that are not able to be outsourced to India or China and perhaps most importantly point to something tangible and say " I was part of making that real".
Politics is more than just good policy. There has to be a level of inspiration. Our opponents on the Right have found their inspiration in the dark and negative. We can combat this and win if we offer the American people a positive and concrete vision of the nation. That requires a big idea, a long term idea. It can be enormously complex in the details, but it has to be simple in its majesty. A nation wide system of high speed rail is such an idea.
This is what the President and the Democrats in Congress need to give the people. A project that says hope, that says we are a nation that is more than just its war making powers; a project that brings the imagination and dreams of Americans back to the possibilities of a nation like ours, and gives a chance to make it real.
This is the kind of thing that many of us were expecting when we heard the message of change from the Obama campaign. His election shows how hungry the country is for that kind of idea made real. It is time to make it real in sound of steel wheels on steel rails.
The floor is yours.
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