From the DKos Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up:
Bob Herbert is thrilled that we will finally have a president who "gets it" when it comes to job creation: The idea that the nation had all but stopped investing in its infrastructure, and that officials in Washington have ignored the crucial role of job creation as the cornerstone of a thriving economy is beyond mind-boggling. It's impossible to understand.
Impossible, that is, until you realize that bandits don't waste time repairing a building that they're looting.
This nails it exactly, I think. After all, it wasn't Markos, or Chris, or Matt, or David, or even me who called the Bush Administration budgets "a kind of looting." It was Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. But, by the same token, getting this basic fact and pledging up front to take significant action on it does not equate to being a progressive. Heck, there was a time when someone might have cited this as evidence of being a proud, far-sighted, but sober-minded American conservative.
More importantly, perhaps, given how confused folks have gotten about labels lately, this pledge is not enough to make sense economically, in terms of basic economic justice. Which is why we need to raise the bar in terms of what we should expect from Obama. Without more details, this could be just be a different--albeit much more responsible--way to make wealthy Americans even wealthier, using taxpayer money. This was explained by economic analyst and historian Michael Hudson explained on Democracy Now! this morning, as part of a powerhouse interview also including Robert Kuttner and Naomi Klein. As Hudson explained, multi-billion dollar infrastructure investments routinely increase nearby property values by considerably more than the cost of such public investments:
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