We have to spend on infrastructure

News is trickling out that the stimulus is not going to pass as written, and that a plan to add infrastructure spending to the stimulus did not garner sufficient support.

I'm sorry, didn't a bridge collapse in Minnesota recently because we've not been spending sufficiently on infrastructure?

And people need jobs. When people are unemployed they stop spending, and then the companies whose products aren't being bought and whose services aren't being used have to lay people off. The pool of unemployed grows and the problem worsens.

We need to employ people.

During the New Deal the government employed people through the WPA and other programs, and by doing so the government accomplished - among other things - the following:

"The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters."

Well, we need to repair our existing infrastructure. We always need more hospitals, schools, and teachers. We need to make some fundamental changes to our electrical infrastructure - transmission lines to take wind-power from where it's generated to where it's needed, smart grids to make energy use more efficient and less expensive. Simply put, there's work to be done.

Normally the markets take care of this. Something needs to be done and from the market emerges companies competing to do it.

But the market is broken just now. Companies are cutting back on the spending that would be necessary to enable them to do the jobs we need. Also states and municipalities are cutting back on spending on the necessary infrastructure changes, so even if there were companies to do it, who's going to pay them?

The government has to step in and pay to get things done, and we need to let them. In the process, folks will be employed, and those employed folks will spend money on various goods and services.

Employment good. Unemployment bad. It's simple, really.

Does it have to get worse before we'll allow our government to start addressing the situation in a meaningful manner?

Personally, I think we should pass an infrastructure bill. Not an economic stimulus package. An infrastructure bill. We need the infrastructure upgrades, and people need jobs.

Also, we don't know what a stimulus package is going to do, exactly, but we know what an infrastructure upgrade is, or what it can be, anyway. It can be what it was in the New Deal, and in the process it will provide economic stimulus as a convenient side effect.