A Stitch in Haste

President-Elect Obama has pledged to “create” 2.5 million new jobs (at an apparent potential cost of $280,000 per job), by “rebuilding infrastructure” — roads and bridges and such.

Maybe I was hallucinating, but didn’t we all spend the past two years or so bitching and moaning about taxpayer money being used to build bridges?

But now using taxpayer money to build bridges is a good thing?

I’m confused.

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So is Bob Herbert (again):

Right now infrastructure projects go forward willy-nilly. They are often financed haphazardly and are subjected to the worst kinds of political influence.

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut is sponsoring a bill that would create an infrastructure bank with a bipartisan board of directors and a chief executive to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The board would streamline the process of reviewing and signing off on major infrastructure proposals. It would determine the value to the public of each project — and its environmental impact. It would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage private investment.

First, note Herbert’s use of “bipartisan” rather than “non-partisan.” That itself belies the delusion that federal taxpayer money can ever be allocated by anything other than inefficient, wasteful formulas crafted via political rather than economic priorities. (See also this link from this morning’s Questions post, or the post-9/11 scandal concerning absurd homeland security budget allocations.)

Herbert is living in a naive fantasy land: The infrastructure decisions will be political, period. They will also therefore be inefficient at best and downright ludicrous at worst.

To the extent that infrastructure projects are legitimate public goods, they should be pursued locally and financed by the people who use them. There is no basis, either in economics or the Constitution, to make taxpayers in Iowa pay for a bridge in Vermont or a train station in Oregon.

If politicians and pundits want to pretend that a massive “New WPA” will somehow rescue the economy, then that is their prerogative. What is not their prerogative is to pretend that politicians can ever stop being politicians.

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Still on the subject of a “New WPA,” here’s a comment I left at Marginal Revolution this morning:

Stimulating the economy by building infrastructure projects may have made sense in the 1930s when the work force consisted almost exclusively of healthy adult males (white, of course, but that’s another blogpost).

How, I wonder, will an all-Democratic government deal with lawsuits claiming that a “new WPA” violates Title VII, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, etc., etc., etc.

Another commenter at MR rightly notes that we are still living with remnants of the “old WPA” mentality — the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Utilities Service, etc. Are those obsolete relics still around because they are vital to the economy, or because they are vital to politicians?

(More on those discrimination statutes, in another context, later this week. Stay tuned.)

Previously:
–Rohatyn’s Big Ditch

Filed under: Activist Legislators & Nanny Statists, Economics & Finance, Fiscal Federalism, Politics