Obama Offers a Transit Plan to Create Jobs (The New York Times)
MILWAUKEE — President Obama, looking to stimulate a sluggish economy and create jobs, called Monday for Congress to approve major upgrades to the nation’s roads, rail lines and runways — part of a six-year plan that would cost tens of billions of dollars and create a government-run bank to finance innovative transportation projects.
With Democrats facing an increasingly bleak midterm election season, Mr. Obama used a speech at a union gathering on Labor Day, the traditional start of the campaign season, to outline his plan. It calls for a quick infusion of $50 billion in government spending that White House officials said could spur job growth as early as next year — if Congress approves.
That is a big if. Though transportation bills usually win bipartisan support, hasty passage of Mr. Obama’s plan seems unlikely, given that Congress has only a few weeks of work left before lawmakers return to their districts to campaign and that Republicans are showing little interest in giving Democrats any pre-election victories.
Central to the plan is the president’s call for an “infrastructure bank,” which would be run by the government but would pool tax dollars with private investment, the White House says. Mr. Obama embraced the idea as a senator; with unemployment still high despite an array of government efforts, the concept has lately been gaining traction in policy circles and on Capitol Hill.
Indeed, some leading proponents of such a bank — including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican of California; Gov. Ed Rendell, Democrat of Pennsylvania; and Michael R. Bloomberg, the independent mayor of New York — would like to see it finance a broader range of projects, including water and clean-energy projects. They say such a bank would spur innovation by allowing a panel of experts to approve projects on merit, rather than having lawmakers simply steer transportation money back home.
“It will change the way Washington spends your tax dollars,” Mr. Obama said here, “reforming the haphazard and patchwork way we fund and maintain our infrastructure to focus less on wasteful earmarks and outdated formulas, and more on competition and innovation that gives us the best bang for the buck.”
But the notion of a government-run bank — indeed, a government-run anything — is bound to prove contentious during an election year in which voters are furious over bank bailouts and over what many perceive as Mr. Obama pursuing a big government agenda. Even before the announcement Monday, Republicans were expressing caution.
“It’s important to keep in mind that increased spending — no matter the method of delivery — is not free,” said Representative Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican who is on a Ways and Means subcommittee that held hearings on the bank this year. He warned that “federally guaranteed borrowing and lending could place taxpayers on the hook should the proposed bank fail.”
The announcement comes after weeks of scrambling by a White House desperate to give a jolt to the lackluster recovery, and is part of a broader package of proposals that Mr. Obama intends to introduce on Wednesday during a speech in Cleveland. The transportation initiative would revise and extend legislation that has lapsed.
Specifically, the president wants to rebuild 150,000 miles of road, lay and maintain 4,000 miles of rail track, restore 150 miles of runways and advance a next-generation air-traffic control system.
The White House did not offer a price tag for the full measure or say how many jobs it would create. If Congress simply reauthorized the expired transportation bill and accounted for inflation, the new measure would cost about $350 billion over the next six years. But Mr. Obama wants to “frontload” the new bill with an additional $50 billion in initial investment to generate jobs, and vowed it would be “fully paid for.” The White House is proposing to offset the $50 billion by eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry.
After months of campaigning on the theme that the president’s $787 billion stimulus package was wasteful, Republicans sought Monday to tag the new plan with the stimulus label. The Republican National Committee called it “stimulus déjà vu,” and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, characterized it as “yet another government stimulus effort.”
But Governors Rendell and Schwarzenegger, and Mayor Bloomberg, who in 2008 founded a bipartisan coalition to promote transportation upgrades, praised Mr. Obama. And in policy circles, the plan, especially the call for the infrastructure bank, is generating serious debate.
“This is a very ripe policy question now,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, who has been working for several years on blueprints for a bank.
On Capitol Hill, Representatives James L. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has been developing his own bill, as has Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut.
Ms. DeLauro’s plan would create an infrastructure bank that would be part of the United States Treasury, where it would attract money from institutional investors, then channel the funds to projects selected by a panel. The program, which would make loans much like the World Bank, would finance projects with the potential to transform whole regions, or even the national economy, the way the interstate highway system and the first transcontinental railway once did.
The outside investors would expect a competitive return on their money, so many of the completed projects would have to charge fees, taxes or tolls. In an interview, Ms. DeLauro said she would be “looking at a broader base,” meaning the bank would finance not just roads and rails, but also telecommunications, water, drainage, green energy and other large-scale works.
But if the projects did not raise enough money, the Treasury might get stuck paying back the investors, a prospect that gave pause to so-called deficit hawks like Mr. Tiberi. In an e-mail last week, he said he agreed the nation’s road and communications networks needed to be improved but was concerned about creating another company like Fannie Mae that might need a bailout.
Inside the White House, the idea for a transportation initiative, and in particular an infrastructure bank, is one that the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been promoting. It was not included in the original $787 billion stimulus program because the administration and Congressional Democratic leaders wanted to pass that package as quickly as possible.
There is no shortage of projects in search of money. The problem, analysts say, is that Congress, which would create the bank, is not known for its ability to single out strategic priorities for growth. Instead, it traditionally builds broad support by giving a little something to everybody — Montana, for instance, would get a small amount of Amtrak money in return for its support for improvements along the Northeast corridor.
“We don’t prioritize,” Mr. Puentes said. “We take this kind of peanut butter approach of spreading investment dollars around very thinly, without targeting them.”
Samuel Staley, director of urban growth and land-use policy for the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research group, said the best way to spend money efficiently would be to establish the bank as a revolving loan fund so that money for new projects would not become available until money for previous projects had been repaid.
Mr. Staley expressed concern that in their zeal to spur growth and create jobs, Congress and the Obama administration would not impose such limits.
“With the $800 billion stimulus program, they were literally just dumping money into the economy,” he said. “There was little legitimate cost-benefit analysis.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from Milwaukee and Mary Williams Walsh from New York.
