Today, Congress is voting on the Obama stimulus plan. What started out as the infrastructure improvement of the century has fizzled into a cobbled-together list of piddling projects that only makes up five percent of the bill.
With a massive price tag in the $850 billion range, this stimulus package should be doing something for the future generations that will be footing most of the bill. Our children and grandchildren will be paying back these IOUs.
The least we can do is use the money for something that they may be still using — roads, bridges, railroads, airports, air-traffic systems etc. It seems only right.
Today’s bill is proposing only $30 billion for roads and bridges and $9 billion for public transportation, and intercity rail is all but left out of the equation. This is hardly “transformational” spending.
After earlier announcements and speech after speech about how infrastructure would be one of the foundations of the new stimulus package, the rhetoric was evidently only a head fake.
Way back when, Eisenhower proposed a $500 billion interstate highway system. Now that was a program that transformed the country and our entire system of transportation. It started in the early 1950s and we are still using it today.
The administration has a mandate to think big, but the powers that be seem to be doing more of the same. Programs that have been failing for years are slated for more money.
Travel infrastructure is being shortchanged in favor of more welfare, Medicaid funds, food stamp programs, temporary health coverage, new school programs, police spending and bailing out underfunded state pension programs.
Where is this dramatic and transformational infrastructure program that was promised? We are asking that question now and in a generation, the same question will be asked again when the bill for Congressional irresponsibility comes due.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
