So the latest buzz out of Washington and the Obama transition is that the new president will hope to pass a massive $500 billion "stimulus" package, to jump-start the economy; and that much of the stimulus will consist of supposedly job-creating, make-work "infrastructure" and public works projects. You know, spending money and hiring people to build new roads and such.
But as Rich Lowry points out today, it's unlikely this will work:
"In any downturn that doesn’t last for years, infrastructure spending suffers from a basic problem: By the time money is actually spent on construction, the recession has passed. “Practically speaking, public works involve long start-up lags,” the Congressional Budget Office wrote in a study earlier this year. “Large-scale construction projects of any type require years of planning and preparation. Even those that are ‘on the shelf’ generally cannot be undertaken quickly enough to provide timely stimulus to the economy.” This common-sense objection to the stimulative powers of infrastructure spending has been made even by Obama advisers. One of Obama’s chief economic advisers, Jason Furman, wrote with former Clinton aide Douglas Elmendorf in January, “In the past, infrastructure projects that were initiated as the economy started to weaken did not involve substantial amounts of spending until after the economy had recovered.” Another Obama economic adviser, Alan Blinder, noted “the lengthy time lags” in infrastructure projects in a 2004 paper and argued that “accelerating the pace of spending on public works for [economic] stabilization purposes would be inefficient and wasteful.”
See, this is important--conservatives must not only point out how liberal principles are misguided. Rather, they must also point out that liberal prescriptions often don't work.
