Word: shoveling
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...lining up for a piece of the stimulus. States that embarked on raucous spending and tax-cutting sprees when they were flush are begging for bailouts now that they're broke. And politicians are dusting off their unfunded mobster museums, waterslides and other pet projects for rebranding as shovel-ready infrastructure investments. As Obama's aides scramble to assemble something effective and transformative as well as politically achievable, they acknowledge the tension between his desires for speed and reform. "We're living that tension every day," an adviser tells TIME...
...this four-alarm economic emergency (nearly 2 million jobs have vanished in four months), it's easy to forget that shovel-ready doesn't necessarily mean shovel-worthy. Many projects are shovel-ready now only because they failed to clear the spectacularly low bar Congress set for pork in the past. Even if we're freaking out about today - and we should be - we can't afford to leverage tomorrow to build the infrastructure equivalent of buried banknotes, not when the deficit is a record $1.2 trillion and the debt a staggering $10.6 trillion. A depression would make both problems...
...transition aide asked. Obama's latest economic report predicted at least three more years of fairly high unemployment even if the stimulus succeeds, so speed can't be the only criterion. Democrat Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, has suggested that shovel-ready should apply to projects that can begin within a year, not just 90 days. This would give a real boost to mass transit; a two-year window would leave even more time to make thoughtful decisions. But if Congress decides that big and fast are all that matters, get ready...
That's why Charlie Rangel might be looking for a shovel these days. The flurries started last summer as a series of embarrassing revelations. Among them was the fact that Rangel was occupying four rent-controlled apartments simultaneously in upper Manhattan and that his tax returns - Rangel is the chairman of the tax-code-writing House Ways and Means Committee - were such a mess that he was hiring a "forensic auditor" to figure out why he had failed to report $75,000 in rental income from a villa in the Dominican Republic. Adding to the tangle of questions...
...make a $25 million decision without doing the research. They put a lot of thought into where it’s going to go, what services it will provide,” Erwin said. “They do all of that homework before they put the shovel in the ground, and if it gets that far along, they’ll be able to withstand the scrutiny.” —Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu...