Main Street

Investing in Us

At a Labor Day event, President Obama proposed a measure to strengthen America’s network of roads, bridges, rail, and air travel.

– Rebuild 150,000 miles of roads and bridges while expanding capacity on some of them.

– Construct and maintain 4,000 miles of rail lines, both high-speed rail and commuter lines. The plan also would “invest in a long-overdue overhaul of the Amtrak passenger fleet.”

– Rehabilitate or reconstruct 150 miles of airport runways and put in place a NextGen air-traffic control system. Among improvements would be use of a satellite-based surveillance system, which would be more accurate than ground-based radar.

This would mean hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction, an industry that currently has a 17% unemployment rate. So cue Republicans complaining about spending—never mind that this is an investment that could be largely covered up front just by eliminating a few tax loopholes that currently go to big oil companies.

But investment. Let’s think about that aspect of it. There’s the investment in jobs—hundreds of thousands of construction workers who have money to spend in their communities, who can afford to make purchases they’ve delayed for a couple years now, which in turn helps stores and service providers. Voila! Increased tax base not because people are paying a higher rate but because they are making more.

Then there’s what gets built. As much as I may think we need a less car-dependent culture, I don’t want to see bridges collapsing and cars plummeting hundreds of feet into rivers. We saw that in Minneapolis just a few years ago, and that wasn’t the only bridge collapse in the US in recent memory. Nor are all our bridges in good shape today. Some are disasters waiting to happen.

Then there’s rail. In the summer of 2008, with gas prices spiking, Amtrak was suddenly very popular. That year:

Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.

But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand.

So when people wanted the service, it was limited because of having been starved for resources for too many years. Gas prices will always fluctuate some over the course of the year, but in the long term, the direction is up. Strengthening Amtrak would be a major environmental plus, it would ease crowding on roads, and it would provide more transportation options—not just when gas prices spiked. Oh, and it would create jobs we need now.

President Obama’s bill is an investment in working people—in jobs and quality of life—an investment in American strength, and an investment in the future.