Word: spent
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...volatile gas prices and our addiction to foreign oil; transit projects also create 9% more jobs. Then again, transit projects like high-speed rail lines and subway stations tend to take more time to build than roads or repairs. And while a recent study calculated that the average dollar spent on infrastructure ricochets into $1.59 worth of short-term growth - a bit better than aid to states or broad-based tax cuts and a lot better than tax cuts for businesses or investors - increasing food-stamp or unemployment benefits packs even more bang for the buck...
...airports are equally deserving of renovation funds when New York City and Chicago have the worst bottlenecks. We shouldn't even think about new bridges in rural Alaska or rural anywhere when a quarter of our existing bridges are structurally deficient. Before Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more money in Louisiana than in any other state - most of it on useless and destructive navigation projects with influential godfathers in Congress - but it never completed those levees around New Orleans. Now the stimulus could include forward-looking efforts to help rebuild the city's natural and man-made...
...prospect of a haphazard stimulus exploding the national debt is scary too - partly because we paid $450 billion in interest last year, rivaling what we spent on Medicare, and partly because our liabilities could crush us if foreign investors sour on Treasury bonds. That's why Obama's advisers want to focus on temporary initiatives that won't drown us in red ink by creating long-term obligations, which they call tails. It would be nice to give cash-strapped transit agencies enough money to reduce fares for a year, but what happens when the year is over? Similarly, some...
...second strategy will be giving money to people - through tax cuts as well as food stamps, jobless benefits and health care for the unemployed. Direct transfers are the fastest way to ship money out of the Treasury, but they don't provide stimulus if they don't get spent. That's what happened last year to a $168 billion stimulus package that relied on income tax rebates - remember when $168 billion was a big deal? - but foundered when many recipients hoarded the cash or paid down credit-card debt. It turns out that smart personal-finance decisions make...
...Environmental Defense Fund started ticking off his wish list in an interview: $1 billion for homeowners to install energy-efficient windows, $750 million for truckers to use fuel-efficient equipment, $600 million for smart boiler controls. "Still $998 billion to go," he said with a sigh. "Really, I spent time on this, and it's a reach to get to $100 billion." Obama and his team are starting to sound irked by demands for more. Why retrofit only 75% of federal buildings? Uh, it's not exactly cost-effective to retrofit a particle accelerator. What about more high-speed rail...