President Obama is expected to sell an $8 billion high-speed rail project today as a jobs creator that will also provide transportation between 13 major US corridors, including Orlando-Tampa.
This is in keeping with the White House’s articulated jobs strategy. It’s not just about jobs now. It’s about jobs that last, and jobs that build something that lasts even longer.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in
December, Christina Romer, chair of the president’s Council of Economic
Advisers, rejected public works projects and explained that Obama
wouldn’t spend money on jobs for the sake of jobs. He wants to build
something. I expect this will be the theme of Obama’s job creation section of the State of the Union.
Romer focused on tax credits for home retrofitting, which would boost
green tech jobs and construction, and infrastructure. Infrastructure
spending has a high multiplier effect, and as this
WSJ story indicates, there’s a lot of excess capacity with construction
companies afraid that their already running out of projects from the
first round of stimulus.
