Posted on 03/17/2020 6:54:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
Here’s the reality on “shovel ready” projects.
Public works projects take, at minimum, 3 years. I’m talking even for a minor intersection improvement.
Year 1 - Design
Year 2 - Right of Way Acquisition
Year 3 - You actually build it
What everyone wants for political purposes are the blue collar jobs in year 3. Unfortunately no one sees the white collar stuff, so “nothing” happens for 2 years.
Add time for bigger projects.
Very few projects are already at the stage where 1 and 2 above are already done, just awaiting final funding to build.
I grew up near a town of 24,000 people. Along the underbelly of that town was a major US river. To the west of the town, an enormous wetlands ‘swamp’ area (around 1,000 to 1,500 ft wide). On the other side of this wetlands....hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and cotton.
As the Obama era arrived and this shovel-ready talk started up, this community suddenly came up with the shovel-ready project, which had never been discussed in a public forum or shared with townspeople. They wanted millions for a bridge which would cross the wetlands area, to the cornfield region, and there would this huge incorporation (new housing) at attach to the city. For around four months, there was a hurried project paper prepared, and a major attempt to get the project money from Washington. No one could cite any real need for the project other than land speculation and real estate development.
Eventually the project died out before the money could be allocated.
There is NOTHING that the vile, demonic Botoxian says, or does, that is good for America. It hates our country and People.
The whole demonRat party should be banned in America.
How about an federal income tax holiday? No withholding for a specified period of time... say a quarter?
“Plenty of shovel ready jobs on the streets of San Francisco.”
Proving that there are far nastier things to catch than COVID-19 — like cholera and dysentery.
Sounds about right.
This is why government *should* move slowly in most cases. It gives time for bad projects to die.
Learned on MSNBC that Bloomberg can give us all a million dollars and have money left over.
There was another major problem with “shovel ready jobs”... a lot of them required union labor. Unions don’t expand very rapidly, so the labor pool in the short & intermediate terms is essentially fixed. Only so many bodies, and few people will be getting union work off the street without an “in” with somebody.
So adding more public works jobs only means that you are tacking more stuff on at the end of however-many-years-backlog that you already have. Hence, no net stimulus.
Oy. Arithmetic is haaaaaaaard, isn’t it.
Whatever happened to contingency planning? Isn't that their JOB?
There ought to be a long list of projects that are fully permitted and literally “shovel ready” to be undertaken in a downturn. But that would require doing things and congress is bad at that.
Not sure what your point is? Personally, I don't want government to have a bunch of projects as contingencies just in case they get money. There should be strategic planning. I'll give you a small example using local government. A township where I used to live for years has strategic planning for infrastructure, e.g., water mains. The projects are on the books years in advance. The projects are also coordinated with the state government for repaving of state roads where township water mains are being replaced. That township has the second lowest taxes in the state and no tax increases for 35 years. It also doesn't have any problems with infrastructure - crumbling roads, water, sewer, etc. because it was run by Republicans that never *invested* in socialistic crap. They had their priorities straight.
If they got an infusion of money from the federal government, then they would only be working on projects that didn't need to be worked on - everything necessary was already planned and paid for. In other words, unplanned projects are wasted money.
I was always okay paying for local/property taxes since they were low and I knew what I was getting. Getting money from the federal government always comes with strings attached, and it is never paid for - inevitably the money is borrowed.
I simply mean being prepared to do what NEEDS doing when it becomes possible to do it.
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