Third World America - Arianna Huffington [36]
Then there is Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who in 2008 teamed up with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to form Building America’s Future (BAF), a bipartisan coalition looking, in Rendell’s words, to “deliver a message to Washington that if America is going to have a future, an economically viable future, a quality-of-life future, a future that involves public safety, we have to begin the business of repairing infrastructure.”18, 19 In a February 2010 speech at an economic conference, Rendell warned, “If we don’t do something quickly, by the time 2030 rolls around, America will be a second-rate economic power.”20 Telling the businessmen in the room that “nothing significant will change until the businessmen step up,” he urged: “We need entrepreneurs to step up and say, ‘Guys, we’re having the living daylights beaten out of us. If we don’t do something quickly, we’re sunk—we’re a cooked goose.’ ”
The Flintstones, a cooked goose, a collapsing empire, a Third World nation. Pick your metaphor. They all translate into the same takeaway: The stakes for America couldn’t be higher.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY: THE STIMULUS BECOMES A FISCAL PIÑATA
By the beginning of 2009, in the wake of the economic meltdown and the election of Barack Obama, it looked like investing money in a massive infrastructure-spending plan would be that rarest of things these days in American politics: a win-win initiative with bipartisan support.
With the economy in desperate need of a boost, building roads, updating our electrical grid, and repairing bridges, dams, and levees could create millions of high-paying jobs—jobs that would have to be located in America and couldn’t be outsourced. According to Department of Transportation estimates, 47,500 jobs would be created for every $1 billion the government spends on highway improvements alone.21
In addition, it could also produce what Rendell described as “a whole boatload of orders for American steel and concrete and timber companies.…22 it would be a huge shot in the arm for the economy, probably the best economic stimulus you could do.”
As the debate over the stimulus began, Tom Friedman, knowing the need and seeing the opportunity, declared: “The next few months are among the most important in U.S. history.”23
But our leaders certainly didn’t act like that was the case. Instead of focusing on infrastructure and job creation—and the gravity of the crisis at hand—we got a load of business-as-usual partisan bickering, special interest lobbying, and pork barrel spending.
The result was a bill Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who was instrumental in transitioning the economic system of the former Soviet Union, called “a fiscal piñata,” an “astounding mish-mash of tax cuts, public investments, transfer payments and special treats for insiders,” and “a grab bag of hasty short-run spending.”24
In the end, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allotted only $72 billion to infrastructure projects.25 “I fear that we may soon look back and say that we missed a huge chance to go bigger and bolder,” Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy, told me at the time the bill was being debated.26 “After all, there were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed: It favored consumption over production; debt over smart savings; and environmental damage over environmental renewal. Some parts of the stimulus package seem to be more of the same—trying to prop up the old, failed economy. That strategy simply won’t work—but we could waste a lot of money and time trying. Instead, we need a new direction for our economy.”
Faced with an even more devastating economic crisis, FDR responded with a large-scale public works program, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian