Obama Pledges Public Works on a Vast Scale - NYTimes.com: "“We need action — and action now,” Mr. Obama said in an address broadcast Saturday morning on radio and YouTube.
Mr. Obama’s plan, if enacted, would be in part a government-directed industrial policy, with lawmakers and administration officials picking winners and losers among private projects and raining large amounts of taxpayer money on them.
It would cover a range of programs to expand broadband Internet access, to make government buildings more energy efficient, to improve information technology at hospitals and doctors’ offices, and to upgrade computers in schools."
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A lot of this spending would involve local governments, so it will have some impact on development policies and that always involves residential and commercial CIDs.
And if Obama thinks that massive public works projects are the way to get "action now," he has another think coming. Undertakings like that require years to get off the ground. In Chicago they have been arguing forever about what to do with a single block of downtown land. Ground Zero in NYC is still a hole in the ground seven years after 9/11. I gather that Obama wants to get around the governmental red tape by dumping money on private projects, but that will require steam-rolling all the local NIMBY and environmentalist and preservationist and anti-eminent domain and anti-sprawl groups. That will be no easy task, and besides, wouldn't that be an ironic role for the world's most successful community organizer?
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