Remember all that talk about how the Bush and Obama stimulus packages were going to create jobs with new public works projects? Well, it hasn’t quite turned out that way. The infrastructure projects are lined up, sure — along with their sizable price tags — but the new jobs are nowhere to be found.
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Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth”….
Even within the construction industry, which stood to benefit most from transportation money, the AP’s analysis found there was nearly no connection between stimulus money and the number of construction workers hired or fired since Congress passed the recovery program. The effect was so small, one economist compared it to trying to move the Empire State Building by pushing against it.
That’s a lot of wasted money, but at least we learned our lesson, right? Road projects don’t work.
Ahem.
Obama wants a second stimulus bill from Congress that relies in part on more road and bridge spending, projects the president said are “at the heart of our effort to accelerate job growth.”
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