Building Back

This is a necessary step towards a brighter (literally) future for America. If we are to begin switching over to electric cars and cleaner fuel sources, we will need a new power grid that can handle vast amounts of electricity. And as we American's have not slowed down a bit in reproducing, we will need new, well kept roads and mass transportation systems. We must look to the long-term future that many ALL-CAPS-USING Americans are unable to comprehend.

Hmmm.

And who will do this work? Our country is graduating fewer engineers and the average laborer is more
content to work in an air conditioned mall, warehouse or restaurant. Luckily, Mexico has an ample supply
of laborers and India and Asia have plenty of engineers. We will get new power grids, new highways
and new buildings but the average American will not benefit from their construction- only from their use.

I will give the commentator kudos for mentioning only the benefit to the users of the infrastructure. The
problem is that the populace is expecting this be a way to lower unemployment and increase the income
of Americans. Too bad this will not be the case.

I wonder if Mr. President-Elect will tell us this...

Please,short comments...!

An Arnold's article is always welcome & interesting.

I wish he wrote it by himself...

His ideas r theoretically ok but they have an odour of socialism.

Nowhere he mentions private sector participation in building/moderrnising the infrastructure,assisted by tax breaks & loan guarrantees.

Arnold must try to be the new Reagan,not a centrist Kennedy...

Absolutely dead on. Congratulations. Now, how are you going to pay for it? Maybe we can import Chinamen to do it like we did in 1850. We can even borrow money from the Chinese gov't to pay for it.

If these governors had some guts, they would start fixing their state economies by cutting the waste in their government budgets through emergency executive orders. A major source of wasted revenues in our states is the social services provided to millions of illegal aliens taking jobs away from American workers, pillaging the healthcare system with uncompensated care that our citizens must pay for; filling prisons with murderers, drug dealers, thieves, burglars, muggers, rapists, etc.; engorging the welfare rolls to collect monthly checks and food stamps; clogging our schools with their children and taking our social security without contributing to their own benefits. We are not the caretakers of Central and South America, Asia, and the other countries who abuse our borders. Our citizens have the right to demand protection from this economic invasion. Our government must enforce the laws we have passed to provide this protection from non-citizens. Deportation is much less expensive than the programs we pay to keep this ridiculous mass of invaders within our borders. The meager cost of deportation will save billions annually and will serve as an investment in our future. Are you listening governors? Let's see some action on behalf of our own citizens, taxpayers, and workers.

With the numbers of bridges that are no longer save all over the country and some of the interstates like part of Interstate 25 I was on recently, we really need to do some work on infrastructure. The retrofitting of buildings to make them more energy efficient would end up saving money in the long run. I agree that government projects can get bogged down, but we can only hope that under our new president they can find a way to streamline the process and maybe we can find honest contractors and union officials to manage the process. Failing that, maybe Americans will pay enough attention to what is going on to blow the whistle on the one's screwing us over. I, for one, have enough of the greed that has overtaken this nation. Many of the failures we have recently suffered are a result of greed and we need to stop it from happening. These projects can work to help our economy if we all become a responsible part of the solution.

Government spending sucks up the Nation's wealth. It does not create it. It competes with private enterprise directly and crowds viable business out, overpays on the wages, and always suffers huge cost over runs. The inefficiency is simply staggering. And this well documented activity is supposed to lead us out of recession?

Infrastructure projects, done wisely, will provide short term benefits like providing jobs, as well as, long term benefits like improving the efficiency of the tax base which means more tax revenue at the same tax rates or lower, certainly a plus in my book. However, there are so many pitfalls to throwing money at infrastructure projects. Allow me to list some of them.

1. The problem with federal and state funded infrastructure projects in certain areas of the country is that they face headlong corruption and bureaucracy problems as a result of the government getting involved. Take for instance the Big Dig and Deer Island Projects in Boston. Both had cost overruns in excess of 50%. Now that is not a lot when you are talking $1.00, but when you are talking $10,000,000,000.00 (in the case of the Big Dig) that is another $5-6 billion. So a $1 trillion plan now costs our country north of $1.5 trillion. The reasons for these overruns are immense:
a. Forcing projects to be closed shop, if they are closed shop allowing the government to negotiate the contracts with the unions instead of the contractors. Unions need to learn to be competitive and run themselves like a business instead of a government agency. I have seen union contractors and subcontractors be competitive with nonunion ones, but they are actually more efficient and ???bring it??? to a jobsite, but these are few and far between. On those projects in Boston, 1 in 4 union workers were necessary for the project and of the 3 out of 4 that were, they only operated at 60-75% efficiency. Thus providing a major reason for cost overruns and a drain on our taxpayer dollars.
b. Design and then Build instead of Design/Build. If you look at the most major successful projects that have been done in the country over the course of the last 10-15 years (such as I-15 Corridor in Salt Lake City, T-Rex in Denver, etc.) they were design/build jobs, where the design was done by private companies that were under the umbrella of the contractor responsible for building the work improving constructability, reducing change orders an streamlining the process, with only government oversight to assure quality. They were successful and the companies made money and the states got their projects usually well ahead of time and at their budget, unlike the two Boston projects which were first Design, then Build.
c. Corruption was rampant in Boston. From contractors, to unions, to suppliers, to government officials. Expediting infrastructure projects to get the economy kick-started, heightens the level of corruption such that it is harder to clamp down on, because things are moving so quickly. Corruption almost always breeds cost overruns, quality issues and safety problems
d. I have used large heavy/civil projects as examples, but the same applies to smaller projects, like museums and schools just the same.

Continued???

2. Force-feeding projects to make them start moving, usually, means making them cost-plus instead of good lump sum hard money projects. There is no incentive in a cost-plus job to cut costs, because the government will just keep footing the bill, ie, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. Countless billions of dollars have been pumped into Yucca Mountain for a project whose state loved the jobs and revenue coming from it, until they realized they might actually have to store nuclear waste in, god forbid, a nuclear waste repository. This work was all done Cost Plus because of government bureaucracy in the project approach, and there was a revolving door of the who???s who of contractors every 2-3 years just suckling at the government teet. If this work had been done lump sum, nobody would have ever done it, for one, but if they did, the costs would have been countless billions less. Throw unions (and in some cases even non-union) into the mix and you get places like the Clinton Nuclear Powerhouse where the project is so massive (4000-5000 workers) that at any given day, the companies doing the work will be spending their cost-plus dollars on 10% ghosts, or people that get paid for a full days work but never even show up, because they are carded in by somebody else. Accelerating projects as seen in the President-Elects plan will push too many projects into a category where there is no accountability for the costs because they are cost plus, or cost reimbursable or some variation of it.
3. There is no trained workforce to take on these projects. Heavy civil projects and especially things like wastewater treatment projects are already short on skilled labor. When you arbitrarily create work to create jobs, you will get people with no experience or appreciation for the work they are doing, and then you have accidents and you have deaths. Look a the Las Vegas City Center Casino as an example of too much work and not having qualified labor force resulting in major safety problems. Good training programs need 3-5 years under the guidance of the right supervision. Then there is the issue of the job locations. Construction requires some hardships like traveling from job-to-job and being away from your family and the culture that you grew up in. There is a reason that construction has had one of the fastest aging groups across all employment sectors, nobody wants to go into it and do the time and travel, even though the money is already pretty good, great in some cases. What happens when there is a nice $2 billion project with lots of jobs in California, but none of the recently laid off Michigan autoworkers want to go there, learn a new trade and work?

Continued???

4. Finally as a comment to those here saying, rail, light transit, tunnels, etc. Yes, they are great projects and have their place, but there are issues with them as well. The person who stated we should build underground rail tunnels across the country from coast to coast, has never built a tunnel and has no idea that the costs of a tunnel, compared to its aboveground counterpart in wide open spaces, is easily 4 times as much and underground work is one of the top 3 most dangerous profession. When I asked a safety manager on a tunnel project once, what would happen if there was a major accident in a tunnel his response was ???body bag count???. Second, people would ever pay attention, rail companies like UP and BNSF are doing a pretty good job of upgrading their rail projects on their own as they need them, by eliminating bottlenecks and adding second lines as needed, because there is a growing profitable private sector demand for the improvements, because rail is actually hip again. But don???t get the government involved, see Amtrack.

There are so many more countless problems to the wrong types, approaches to and means of building new infrastructure projects, I could go on and on. Yes, we should make improvements that would help our country become overall more efficient and help us in the long run increase our ability to pay down our burgeoning national debt, but they have to be smart and not forced for the sake of job creation, else we will all pay more and will get so much less out of our hard earned money.

Not a bad idea. It will definitely create all sorts of jobs and in times like this, it is better then those bailout talks.