Liberty Pen: John Stossel- 'Infrastructure Spending'

Source:Liberty Pen- Talking about infrastructure spending. Not exactly a ratings grabber on cable news.

"Roads and bridges present a noble facade for political pork. Liberty Pen."

Source:Liberty Pen

Infrastructure investment (as I call it) used to be a bipartisan thing. The majority of the members of both party's in Congress. But today with bipartisanship becoming so unpopular in both party's with both party's wanting so much to have all of the power in the Federal Government and not some of it and with Libertarians having a bigger voice in American politics today, infrastructure investment at least from the Federal Government, no longer has much Bi Partisanship.

And the reasons for this is when infrastructure bills are passed, there's a lot of waste in them. With earmarks, with money thats supposed to go to one project and ends up in another project instead. That may have nothing to do with economic growth. And with the Tea Party and the libertarian movement wanting the Federal Government to cut everywhere and not make any new investments in the economy and with their influence on the Republican Party right now, infrastructure investment has become almost impossible to pass right now.

But the need to repair and rebuild and add to our public infrastructure are still there and if anything have gotten bigger. We have both roads and bridges crumbling right now that need to be fixed and we have the construction workers in the private sector to do this work and a lot of them are currently unemployed right now and need to work. So we need to find a way to do this and pass something out of Congress that the President would sign into law. And we need to think out of the box in order to make this happen.

In the 2009 during the stimulus debate when the American Recovery Act was passed, infrastructure investment was considered in that debate and some was passed. But the problem was in a bill of 800B$ only 45B$ of that was for infrastructure investment. And Conservatives and Libertarians have used that to say that infrastructure investment doesn't work, because we tried that in 2009 and almost three years later we have a larger unemployment rate.

So thats the justification that the Tea Party and other use to argue why we shouldn't pass infrastructure investment today. And what they don't mention is that only 5% of the ARA was infrastructure investment. 45B$ aint going to get it done to rebuild our public infrastructure, we need 10-12 times more then that and do it over 5-10 years. But we should pay for it and do it in a responsible way by paying for it and only invest in infrastructure that needs to be built or repaired. That would benefit the economy and not these bogus earmarks that are for special interest groups. Which is why this process needs to be open and clean. Which is why I'm for creating a National Infrastructure Bank that would fund our infrastructure investment through the private sector by encouraging investment into our public infrastructure. And then hiring private construction company's to do the work.

I'm not for passing massive highway bills that are loaded up with earmarks that are done in the back room that go to fund things that have nothing to do with public infrastructure. But investing in infrastructure in a clean and open process by creating a National Infrastructure Bank that would be independent of the Federal Government, self-financed, by getting the private sector to invest into our infrastructure investment. That these company's would also collect profits from and prioritize infrastructure investment. And then hire private construction company's to do the work.