Stimulus

I was reading Business Insider this morning and Joe Weisenthal has an article about the fact that shovel ready projects are not really shovel ready, and that maybe we should be thinking more long term.

I tend to agree that we should be thinking more long term, but I have to say Obama is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. There is a strong chorus of people that think he should only focus on the short term and that all of this focus on the broader agenda such as health care and education is irrelevant when the economy is broken.

I believe it to be true that the banking system must be fixed, but I also believe it is true is that the reason we are here is because of serious systemic problems beyond banking. And the keys to fixing that include education, health care, and yes, infrastructure.

In the Business Insider piece, Weisenthal suggests that some of the stimulus money should be aimed at the power grid. I agree with that as well. The grid is a huge issue which was reinforced for me this weekend. I read a piece (which I cant find but I am sure someone will help out with in comments) about a new battery invention that, if it makes it to market, will allow us to recharge batteries in seconds. That sounds great, but the problem is that such a technology, which is *exactly* what we need, would cause our current power grid to fall over. I haven't done the math but I would presume that using such technology, charging a car in seconds would suck thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of amps. In other words it would quite literally melt the power lines into a charging station based on current electrical infrastructure.

Basically, if we are going to move from depending on electricity to power our cars, not only do we need to be able to do things like move the electricity from wind farms in the middle of the country via some kind of smart grid, that new grid needs to be several orders of magnitude more brawny to support the kind of demands that an electricity based mobility infrastructure would require.

And this brings me back to the larger point. I don't know whether it should be called stimulus, but I think we should be spending several trillion dollars on infrastructure over the next five or ten years. We need to catch up with what we haven't spent for the last several decades. This kind of spending should be focused on making us more efficient and more effective. Yes to education, but also yes to high speed rails and new power grids, and repairing our bridges, and building new ones. This kind of spending, properly managed, would not, as some argue, be a waste, and it is in fact what I believe the role of government is. Imagine for example where this country would be without an interstate highway system. These big ticket big vision items are the kinds of things that only the federal government can do, and therefore should, and must do.