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John Judis and Matt Yglesias are talking abut the absence of high speed rail in Obama's stimulus package. Judis laments it. Yglesias does too, but notes that high speed rail isn't the sort of thing you can build in a 24-month time frame. It's infrastructure investment, in other words, but not stimulus. This is the sort of thing I'm increasingly worried about. In The New Yorker this week, Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard, offers an analogy that's about green jobs but fits the infrastructure/stimulus dilemma:
Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single-policy instrument.”The fact that we need a massive stimulus plan has been very good for people who believe we need a comprehensive new infrastructure agenda. But it's a stimulus plan first. And so we're going to end up building a lot of things that state governments know how to build and already have plans to build. Those things will, in large part, be roads. Important, innovative investments like high speed rail, which the system is not used to constructing, will probably not make it into the 24-month window, and as such won't be funded.That would all be fine if forward-thinking infrastructure investment were a regular priority of the government. But it's not. And though deficits don't matter at this moment in time, in three or four years, after we've finished with all this spending, they're likely to matter quite a lot. Spending new money will become harder, not easier. We may end up with an investment program that, particularly on transportation, entrenched a lot of our bad habits, did fairly little to modernize, and made it harder to fund infrastructure investment qua infrastructure investment down the line. We'll have showered, but dinner won't be quite what we'd imagined. I'm not sure what can be done about that -- we need a stimulus, and the projects in it need to be quick -- but it's worth spending some time ineffectually fretting about.
