President Barack Obama delivered a Rose Garden statement on Monday regarding his administration’s new plans to approve a $50 billion project that will upgrade our “woefully inefficient and […] outdated” infrastructure. As usual, I have a few beefs with Obama’s economic mindset and facts.
First, he mentioned that the average American spends more on transportation each year than on food. I, for one, do not. Assuming I had a car in the first place, infrastructure has nothing to do with transportation costs unless you take into account the relationship between gasoline and bumper-to-bumper traffic, in which case the problem could be more simply solved by letting companies drill here. That’s for another time.
My transportation expenses this year have included $200 for a longboard and an extra $5 for a sweet sticker so I look awesome when I ride it down the street, which leads to my second problem.
Whenever I’m awake at 3 a.m. and realize that I’d rather go to eat Taco Bell than do homework, there usually aren’t any cars around, so I longboard down the middle of Rural Road and feel like a rebel. Yet somehow no crack in the street has ever made me fall and drop my food.
So, unless someone’s truck has smaller wheels than my longboard, I think we’re fine here in Tempe. Opinions aside regarding whether our roads need to be fixed, it is agreeable that this is a city issue, not something that should be decided at the federal level.
As for the economy, the point of this plan, aside from improving our “outdated” infrastructure as if it’s a fashion trend, is to employ the one out of five construction workers currently out of work.
If everyone started to get really healthy and doctors were out of work, would we have the government pay doctors to treat patients who aren’t sick?
You can’t just create a job out of thin air. I mean, you can, but it isn’t really a job. Yes, the unemployment rate will decrease slightly and the nation’s GDP will increase, but these numbers mean nothing in terms of long-term productivity.
This stimulus, like all others, is a misallocation of resources that will guide workers away from real, permanent jobs to temporary jobs we created in order to ease immediate pain.
Economist Robert Higgs has described the idea of stimulus as scooping up water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end, all the while expecting the pool level to rise, not realizing that the water is evaporating from our hands the entire time.
We cannot force the market to accept jobs it does not need. The only way to control this situation is to admit we have no power at all. Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
