It’s Political Action Day in the media, with big names stumping for more infrastructure spending. Over at Politico, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe called for a new highway bill, as well as more room for public-private partnerships. In a co-authored op-ed, they describe the nation’s woes as follows:
Substandard road conditions, obsolete road designs and roadside hazards are responsible for nearly one-third of the 37,000 U.S. highway fatalities each year. This is particularly true for the more rural areas.
From 1980 to 2006, the total number of miles traveled in cars increased by 97 percent; in trucks, by 106 percent. Yet over that same period, the number of highway lane miles grew by only 4 percent.
The 2005 federal highway and transit funding bill that provides about 40 percent of spending expired almost a year ago. It has been limping along under a series of extensions.
The remaining 60 percent of spending comes from state, county and local governments, which, generally speaking, have been forced to slash transportation investments as a result of the current economic crisis.
It is no wonder the public is fed up with governments’ inability to take action and meet the challenges of upgrading and modernizing our transportation systems.
The answer, they contend, is a big upswing in public-private partnerships:
To provide the kind of infrastructure that Americans need and deserve, we must find innovative ways of paying for it. One tool — private investment — must play a larger role in delivering projects.
Instead of creating obstacles to private investment, as some in Congress are proposing, we must embrace the private sector to help leverage scarce federal and state dollars.
Meanwhile at the Daily Beast, sixteen big-name economists and historians, including Joseph Stiglitz, Alan Blinder, Robert Reich, Laura Tyson, and Sir Harold Evans, have produced a manifesto calling for more government stimulus funds and tax credits. Making deficit-cutting a top priority, they argue, is precisely what got us into such huge trouble in the 1930’s:
The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families and to employ other tax-cut and spending programs to boost demand. Making deficit reduction the first target, without addressing the chronic underlying deficiency of demand, is exactly the error of the 1930s. It will prolong the great recession, harm the social cohesion of the country, and continue inflicting unnecessary hardship on millions of Americans.
Granted, there’s been plenty of debate over whether the ARRA has in fact created jobs — but we’ve come out strongly on the side of the “yes, it has” evidence, and these major minds in economics and policy clearly agree.
• Some of the money from the Recovery Act is being used to promote it, mostly in the form of large signs next to many of the fundedprojects. (ABCNews) 
Thus far, stimulus spending on roads and bridges has had virtually no effect on local unemployment levels, and has only minimally boosted the construction industry, according to a new study by the AP (via 
