...in the current economic climate.
- It neglects the reality that deferring infrastructure renewal places a burden on future generations just as surely as does government borrowing.
This seems pretty vital. If we can keep the borrowing level reasonable, spend it all on infrastructure and allocate the funds correctly ... lot of ifs.
Larry Summers can go fuck himself. IMF can go fuck itself, too. This isn't revolutionary or groundbreaking. It's just econ 101. Where was he back in '09 when all the stimulus spending was being undertaken? We could have spent $2-3 Trillion at that time (mostly on infrastructure improvements, which are desperately needed), because BO was in a position to do whatever he wanted. Larry and his crew played politics and recommended less than a third of that. It's always the same thing with these "liberals". Robert Reich did the same shit: dropped the ball when he had a chance to act (remember, both of these dipshits were big shots in the Clinton administration, back when the Clinton administration was busy dismantling all the Depression-era financial rules that were put there for a good goddam reason), but then made a fuckload of money on a book tour about how fucked the current financial and economic systems are. Excuse me for not feeling uplifted by their brilliance.
Thank you. I was reading this and thinking, jesus h, this is relevatory? "HARVARD PROF AND FORMER PRESIDENT: ROADS ARE GOOD" Or is it the fact that an organization as conservative as the IMF, by backing as liberal or progressive an idea as borrowing-fueled-stimulus, giving further legitimacy to these ideas? Because I guess that's good. Now let me check, do House Republicans give a fuck what the IMF thinks?
Note here, that investing in infrastructure in many cases does nothing. Building a new road to nowhere or empty buildings is a net economic loss. We should be opening up bottlenecks, looking to where things aren't done because they are too hard and too slow, and make them easy and fast. Infrastructure investment shouldn't ever be a jobs program.
I think they mean more along the lines of maintenance/repairs. The water pipes in my city are fucked. I remember watching an interview where the expert said it would theoretically take 10 years to repair it all if we concentrated ALL our resources on it (so no other city repairs for the next 10 years). Based on its own data, Montreal loses upwards of 40% of its water... that's huge. We still have some wooden pipes and somebody will have to fix it all eventually. I would not mind the city investing more money into that.