Obamasscity
At the risk of creating the impression that I’m just another of the hand-wringing masses obsessed with second guessing the guy who isn’t even president yet and how he may or may not be already failing to live up to his own “change” hype, I couldn’t stop myself from following up my two previous posts with a mention of the latest regarding the infrastructure stimulus:
“In proposing a stimulus plan that could total as much as $1 trillion, Obama has promised a new federal infrastructure program that would dwarf President Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system that began in 1956.
The concern is that because the States have control over where the money is spent, the stimulus plan could end up looking all too much like the interstate highway system. That is, we’ll spend most of the money abetting car culture, rather than aggressively embarking on the massive retooling of transportation infrastructure that needs to start immediately, if not sooner.
What L.M. wrote in 1958:
“When the American people, through their Congress, voted last year for a twenty-six billion dollar highway program, the most charitable thing to assume about this action is that they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were doing. Within the next fifteen years they will doubtless find out; but by that time it will be too late to correct all the damage to our cities and our countryside, to say nothing of the efficient organization of industry and transportation, that this ill-conceived and absurdly unbalanced program will have wrought.”
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