Ron Fournier’s free flight of fancy on a Hillary Clinton presidency (“the right way”) at Atlantic is getting a lot press so I may as well remark on it. At Atlantic Mr. Fournier posted a set of recommendations to Hillary Clinton in the form of an open letter to her. Rather than doing a full-fledged fisking of it I’ll just concentrate on two of his bullet points: infrastructure and executive authority.
Infrastructure
Mr. Fournier’s statement:
This is another issue upon which most Americans agree: The nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and other concrete components of a modern nation are crumbling. You could launch an infrastructure “moon shot,†creating millions of jobs and positioning the nation for another century of dominance.
Just as was the case with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”) there is no earthly way any foreseeable infrastructure spending plan whether presented by Sec. Clinton or anybody else will produce the results he foresees.
Roads, bridges, etc. are built by vendors from an approved vendor list. Present day governance rules require it. They’ve already bought their equipment and already hired their workers. Such a program would actually do relatively little in the way of creating jobs.
If you want to actually accomplish anything with a program of federal spending (a “moonshot” project) it’s got to be in an area in which megavendors aren’t already mobilized to suck up any money that’s put on the table. That won’t be aerospace, defense, healthcare, education, or any thing else I can think of. I don’t know what that might be.
Besides our actual problem is that we don’t maintain what we build. The lion’s share is always spent on new construction. Unless you can envision the Paul Ryan Pothole Filling or the Harry Reid Highway Resurfacing, that’s going to remain the case.
What will actually happen would be that a lot of money would be appropriated which would disappear into the coffers of the already wealthy and some of it would make its way into the campaign funds of incumbent politicians. It wouldn’t do much to improve “crumbling” infrastructure.
IMO that’s something that should be done by state and local governments anyway. Why should the taxpayers of Illinois be paying for causeways in Alaska or a bridge in Maryland? I just don’t see it.
Executive Authority
Mr. Fournier’s statement:
You should use the singular power of clemency to bring justice to minorities given draconian drug sentences. So far, Obama has shown relatively little mercy. On the other hand, you should cede to Congress powers that both Obama and President George W. Bush abused for war-making, domestic spying, and immigration.
If there is one thing on which Democratic and Republican presidents agree, it is the desirability of expanding presidential power. Besides “war-making, domestic spying, and immigration”, horrifyingly, have become valence issues.
A valence issue is one on which the parties agree. Motherhood and apple pie issues. Different candidates vie with each other over how ardently they support the issue. A strong defense is a valence issue.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Democratic presidential primary debates it is that de facto open borders has become a valence issue among Democrats. Sanders and Clinton only argued over how little they would enforce our immigration laws.
My recommendation to Mr. Fournier is that he should dream no small dreams. Rather than the tepid, paltry, inside baseball suggestion he’s proposing he should imagine that Sec. Clinton reconstruct herself as some sort of unlikely amalgam of Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Theresa, and Joan of Arc. It would make for more interesting reading and would be no less fantastical than what he’s actually written.
If Hillary Clinton is elected president, for good or ill she will remain who and what she is. She won’t suddenly sprout wings and fly. Take it or leave it.
Third sentence in:
“I’ve been talking to a diverse set of political insiders, including many who are close to Hillary Clinton, to understand what form a genuinely transformative presidency might take.”
Just a wee bit of cognitive dissonance there….
It’s a pretty claustrophobic idea of transformation, anyway.
I think its disappointing that the list of infrastructure shortcomings almost never seems to mention sewers. Roads, bridges and airports comes across as the wishlist of the commuting class for more lanes and capacity (which in turn will increase usage and demand).
So long as sewers are taking stuff away from point of origin, people don’t care how “crappy” they are, unless the road above it is collapsing. Older cities, particularly in the Midwest, have combined sewers that tend to discharge wastewater into the Mississippi or the Great Lakes, so the normal incentives are not in play because the problem occurs in another state or shared water resource. When the incentives are not aligned, the government has either carrots or sticks, and many of these municipalities don’t have the revenue to make suing them out-of-business attractive.
One of the questions I ask about proposed infrastructure improvements is “will it still be relevant for the productive life of the improvement?” I think a lot of our roads and bridges are already obsolete or will be within the next 20 years. And building more makes sense?
Chicago is a wonderful object lesson in this as in so much. Chicago’s road system was designed for the 1970s and, well, the requirements have changed. It has become absurd. Commuting into the city in the morning and out at night no longer makes any sense. And, as you have suggested, its road system has created sprawl.
IMO we actually need fewer roads and bridges and an active program of decommissioning. That’s something that will never happen for the reasons I mentioned in the body of the post.
The largescale infrastructure improvement of which we’re more in need is an upgrade to the power grid. It’s not something that private industry will tackle but it also doesn’t project the image of large gangs of men with shovels which seems to be politically necessary.
I cannot think of a single road or bridge in Marin County that should be decommissioned. I can sit down with a map and point out any number of necessary improvements. We have freeway on and off-ramps that are nightmares of bad design. We have high volume, four lane surface streets that narrow to two lane for no reason before expanding back to four. I could go on and on.
The notion that any amount of spending, no matter how huge the investment, will somehow be met by existing vendors is unconvincing. Demand X has given rise to Vendors Y employing Z workers, if you tripled X you would clearly need more workers unless your theory is that all road construction companies are wildly overstaffed. The regs you cite are not exactly the Rocky Mountains of obstacles.
We may not need more net roads or bridges, but we do need reliable and safe roads and bridges that can accommodate the move to driverless vehicles, which you will notice are coming, despite predictions that regulations and insurance issues would make it impossible. There is a staggering amount of work that needs doing. I travel fairly widely around the US and Europe and there is simply no question that our roads suck, as do our airports, as do our public transit systems, as does our power grid and our information grid.
As for why an Illinois taxpayer should buy a bridge in Alabama, here’s why: because states are an absurd anachronism that should be increasingly ignored and allowed to atrophy – Illinois being a museum quality example of a state that clearly should not be self-governing. I mean, come on, Delaware is a political entity? Delaware is Philadelphia. And Illinois is Chicago and its suburbs. Three quarters of Illinois population is in the Chicago statistical area, and rather than sending money to Springfield, taxpayers in Evanston and Wilmette should be paying Chicago, the political entity that actually matters.
They’ll traffic the work. That’s what they did under the ARRA and that’s what they’d do in the event of another major infrastructure improvement plan.
OT but you’ll find this interesting, I think: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/normal-america-is-not-a-small-town-of-white-people/
Nate Silver’s folks did a statistical analysis of those cities and states that look most like the “real America” in terms of demos. Turns out: big cities are the real America, and your own lovely state is the one most in line with national demographics. Of the ten states most like the current demos, 7 are solidly Democratic, and 3 are swings. Of states that look most like 1950’s America, that’s basically reversed.
Since you are a city dweller I guess I can see you wanting so many roads decommissioned. When stuff can’t get to you, you might change your mind. We could certainly use a major upgrade to our electricity infrastructure. We also need more east-west pipelines, though I think those are probably underway.
Steve
I was aware of that. However, I’m not sure how meaningful his analysis is or, indeed, whether the topic he’s trying to address is actually amenable to analysis.
The reason for that is that minority populations tend to be highly concentrated. Whether that’s for reasons of preference or exclusion isn’t relevant. All that’s relevant is that it’s true.
So, for example, there are counties in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia in which 75% or more of the population is black. There are hundreds of counties in all sections of the country that are 95% or more white.
The same is true of Hispanic population, Asian population (a term I despise), or Native American population.
A heat map would be a better indicator.
I’m not sure how to put the issue I’m getting at succinctly. Maybe “looking like America” and “seeing things the way most Americans see them” are two different things. The notion of an average distribution is nonsensical.
Most of the people who read the ASCE infrastructure report never get past the executive summary. When you look at their state analysis of Illinois quite a number of the roads in major disrepair and bridges in falling down condition are in rural parts of the state, haven’t been in use for decades, and never served more than a few people. That skews the statistics.
I’m all for repairing things that would actually be of use but I think that decision is best made at the local level and the best measure is willingness to pay.
I concur that demographics rarely are equally distributed so there is a fair blending of the masses, neatly arranged in proportions statistically representing their percentages in this country. People seem to simply feel more comfortable congregating with similar ethnicities. You see this even in k-12 settings.
A suggestion for what’s needed in infrastructure upgrades would be new water pipes, especially in the Los Angeles area, where they are routinely rupturing and wasting water in a time of severe drought.
Most effective spending within current vendor system would likely be on major environmental programs like energy and water efficiency, solar/wind, restoration and cleanup, green roofing. Better economically to set up an agency directly employing but not in ten thousand years would Clinton do this.
jan’s idea of prioritizing infrastructure wasteful of resources would have real benefits to national wealth.
Dave:
It’s relevant as a counter to the national myth that we are some blend of rugged white frontiersmen, main street businessmen and salt-of-the-earth farmers. In reality, we are city people who drive cabs, teach school, manipulate money and paper and occasionally make stuff. We’d make better policy if we stopped clinging to false nostalgia. A major portion of the US Senate represents states with no real city to call their own, senators who are entirely disconnected from the real life of most real Americans.
As to roads, I’ve never been on a road that didn’t go somewhere. Unless we have a list of places we no longer need to go, I think we probably need all these roads and bridges.
We could also hire an army of unemployed to clear trails and parks and streams, tear down abandoned buildings, paint shabby business districts, haul away abandoned vehicles, plant trees, and many more jobs, all of which are so low-skill even I can do them.
As for major construction projects, how about if instead of putting them out to the lowest bidder, we try something a bit more sophisticated and take the bid that best squares the circle between low cost and new jobs? Easy enough. And I’m sorry, but you are not going to convince me that double or triple the amount of construction projects would somehow all be done without new workers and new equipment. It defies the laws of physics. If you place time limits on completion you force firms to take on more help or create a demand for new firms. That, too, is not hard.
According to the BLS, there are less than 320k “Highway, Street, and Bridge Construction” jobs in the US (that includes everyone from CEO’s on down). Expanding that to include all “Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction” jobs, the BLS number is 919k. So, Fournier’s assertion we can “create millions of jobs” (that’s millions with an ‘s’ ) just demonstrates his complete ignorance on the subject and his inability or unwillingness to do even simple Google-based research. You’d think a “senior political columnist” for a major publication would be able to do basic research, or at least have the resources to purchase market profiles with more detailed information, or perhaps have a an intern or two with internet skills, but obviously not.
Thanks, Andy, for some sanity. As an owner in an infrastructure company there are some bizarre notions here. Starting with the notion of million(s) of jobs available.
Related, doubling or tripling the number of projects would bring the nations transportation system to a giant grinding halt. Try driving the major north south corridor of I-75 to I-65, or around Tampa, Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville or Chicago as I recently did. The highways and bridges made great parking lots. The economic costs must be staggering.
Employing an “army” of public works projects was tried. Legions didn’t show up for work. Today the rabble rousers would scream forced labor if a check wasn’t just mailed.
And Dave is correct. Willingness to pay separates dreamers from realists. We don’t have the will or resources to pay. Haven’t for at least 30 years. And if we did most of it would line the pockets of people connected or loud, and very little would result in concrete laid.
It sounds great to the naive, but just building and repairing willy-nilly is classic ham fisted government.