From Politico:
Obama had committed just before Thanksgiving to saving or creating 2.5 million jobs in the next two years, more than twice his campaign promise of 1 million new jobs over an unspecified period. But he didn’t say how he would do it. On Saturday, he began to spell it out, offering “five key parts” of his economic plan:
â€â€ENERGY: “[W]e will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.â€Â
â€â€ROADS AND BRIDGES: “[W]e will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.â€Â*
â€â€SCHOOLS: “[M]y economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.â€Â
â€â€BROADBAND: “As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.â€Â
(Incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had talked about expanding broadband access, but this is the first time the transition has formally proposed it.)
â€â€ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS: “In addition to connecting our libraries and schools to the Internet, we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the Internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.â€Â
*Note to Obama: states are broke
Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.â€Â
How much is THAT going to cost us?
Oh, Carin, you won’t be complaining when the federalize teh internet. After all, 1) it’ll be “free” and 2) you won’t be complaining.
HOnestly, is there more to this you’ve left out? That’s his “plan” to save our economy?
It’s a work in progress, Carin. He’ll be adding stuff as it strikes his fancy.
Well crap, that’s horrible. Honestly, just horrible. It sounds like he’s still campaigning.
That’s all he knows, Carin.
You know what happens when you modernize an inner city school w/o making systemic changes in the way the school is run?
Everything gets stolen and vandalized. And, given Detroit’s track record, half the shit is stolen by the staff.
A few years back, they “modernized” Detroit schools with flat screen tvs. I don’t think any of ’em made it to a classroom. Staff offices and homes, I believe was where most of them ended up.
If one uses the Interstate Highway act as a yardstick we will be in the Obama depression for 35 years. The interstates were a national defense initiative and was estimated to cost only 12 billion. It eventually cost over 114 billion and would in todays dollars cost over 400 billion.
One Hopes the One is just groggy and still spouting campaign rhetoric. If not, where does the line form to learn how to be a track hoe operator? I want to beat the rush from all those Wall Street finance types and political pundits.
AND, if Obama’s gonna start work on MORE of the roads around me, I may go postal on someone. Detroit’s highways have been a nightmare of red barrels and completely closed roads. 75 going THROUGH Detroit (from just South to just North) has been closed for a year and scheduled to be closed for another year. It is the main artery of the city.
Well, Carin–maybe Detroit doesn’t NEED arteries anymore.
If our tax dollars are so “precious” to us then why do Obama and the Democrats always want more and more? Things that I hold “precious” should not be taken by force.
In what way is it “new and smarter” to tell States, spend it or we’ll end it? I foresee many, many, end of the fiscal year, porked up projects. Done only to “spend” the federal money.
I wanna hear how the shills are gonna spin this. It didn’t work for FDR, unless he’s county on a global war.
Hope and change is beginning to look like a six year old girls soccer game.
What’s “broken” about our schools is the who and how they are run, and who, how, and what is taught. Repairing a few windows, fixing heating systems, putting in light bulbs, is not, and is insane to consider it, as a Federal Government job. Obama, school janitor to the nation.
Fix our public schools? Dump the NEA. Fire 75% of the administrators, at least. Drop the ed. degree requirement. Require teacher knowledge of the subject matter taught. 3 R’s in elementary schools. Taught the old ways that worked. Not the new ways that are there only to make the teacher’s job more interesting and less subject to criticism because no one, especially parents, actually understands what they are doing. It’s so above the parents pay grade don’t you know.
Obama, Jimmy the Clinton part II, more expensive, less effective.
How about we start with baby steps?
The Federal government has full control over the District of Columbia (which, probably to no one’s surprise, has some of the worst schools in the country).
1) Implement Obama’s policies in DC schools.
2) Require all federal officials who work in DC to send their children to those schools.
From the 70’s through the 90’s every year I’d vacation in Ontario. I’d always leave so as to hit Detroit around 3 to 4am so I could get through without too much trouble. I’d then take the 401 in Ontario. I’d hit Toronto around the morning rush hour. A world of difference in the highways back then. Toronto is/was 12 lanes. All maintenance was done at night by closing a lane at night then back open for rush hour. Haven’t been there now for well over 10 years so it may have changed.
I had to smile over that “ranks 14th” for broadband access the One was whining about. Hasn’t Obambi ever looked at a map of these 57 United States? The place is a bit, um, spread out. One reason is that in order to get broadband Internet access to every little town and farm requires someone to run the copper or fiber to the vicinity to carry it. I suppose he’s going to get legislation passed to force AT&T, Comcast or whomever to do the job, cost be damned.
Indeed, working for the EEE-VIL HALLIBURTON as I do, I was surprised to see how many forty-miles-from-nowhere/in-the-back-of-beyond locations there are around the country where you can get either Internet over cable or DSL.
The problem that internationalist assholes like Obama and his flunky have is that comparing the United States to other countries in just about any area falls apart when you look at the details. This is for the simple reason that in so many ways the US is unique in the world.
Flunkies, plural. PIMF
“counting” doh!
First you’re going to have to make them move back into DC SBP, before you can make them send their kids to the schools there. In the alternative you could make DC move to them, by ceding it to Maryland I guess.
That would beat the prospect of an additional two democrat senators from DC now on the horizon though, so two birds etc.
Geez, Sdferr, what has Maryland ever done to you?
Cave Bear. Rusty’s test for civilization;
Drive 100 miles outside any major city in the industrialized world and see what services are available.
Drive 100 miles outside any major city in the developing world and hope that your least problem is that you get lost.
There is no cell service in Bruce Crossings Michigan, but the IGA is open 24 hours and they got pretty decent hot wings. Oh. And at Tolpos Bar, across the street, I can get a shot of Jack daniels for three bucks.
First you’re going to have to make them move back into DC SBP, before you can make them send their kids to the schools there.
I figure that local school districts will be abolished under the new Federalized regime.
After all, it’s not fair that some kids get better schools than others simply because their parents go to the trouble and expense of moving, right?
Two words, Dan, Peter Angelos. Well four words, Paul Sarbanes. No, make that six, Barbara Mikulski.
DC has some hot-shot new head of schools-person. Of course, she’s really upsetting the NEA-types, so she may get canned before her changes are made.
She may actually turn out to make a difference Carin, or at least come closer than anyone in living memory to have done.
She may. If she can fight the powers that be the NEA.
Good test, Rusty. And you are right about the truly important things. I’ll take a shot of Jack Daniels for $3 over cell service any day…:)
Ms Rhee seems to have the will to fight Carin, and best of all it appears to date that her fight is righteous, which is to say, moved by outrage at the state of education in the District and in the interest of the kids she serves. She’s a rare one, that one. Plus she has the whole hearted — albeit not altogether trustworthy — backing of the Mayor.
Public schools were already idiot factories when I opted out, almost 30 years ago now, and they don’t seem to have improved one bit. For what it’s worth, the high school I gave the heave-ho to had been rated in the top ten, nationwide, just a short time before I attended, and I understand that it was still considered to be among the best. The thought depresses me.
If we’re willing to allow the auto companies to fail, then why not public schools? We’ll never fix what’s broken, or even get a clear idea of what the real issues are, as long as we refuse to admit how broken they really are. Scrap ’em. People like me will make sure that our own kids, and others we care about, will be educated, and the ones that don’t care enough to see to their own will deal with the consequences.
Yeah, most of those uneducated children will choose a life of crime over the local McDonalds, but isn’t that happening already? And won’t stricter attention to law enforcement solve that problem faster than classroom computers and flat screen TVs?
Really, I am not impressed. Has anyone looked around the country at road and construction projects. Most of the faces I see in that line of work are Mexican immigrants, probably legal and illegal. Get real, I do not think that is going to help the white collar workers getting the axe or laid off. White Americans do not do much of that type of labor. It would probably take a real depression for that to happen.
oh. They will have to use union workers is the point I think Peter. Some workers is more equal than others is what I heard.
So, if Obama -excuse me, President-Elect Obama- demands that states use their federal dollars for infrastructure maintenance (or lose them), will my state (MA) not need to collect any of those tolls, gas taxes, automobile excises, and registry fees they now collect for quote infrastructure maintanance endquote; or should I just pass my share of those sums directly to any state workers in my neighborhood?
31. Comment by Peter Haase on 12/7 @ 5:06 pm #
Really, I am not impressed. Has anyone looked around the country at road and construction projects. Most of the faces I see in that line of work are Mexican immigrants, probably legal and illegal. Get real, I do not think that is going to help the white collar workers getting the axe or laid off. White Americans do not do much of that type of labor. It would probably take a real depression for that to happen.
Well, yeah, if you only look out your windshield.
You gotta account for all the necessary directors, chairmen, managers, inspectors, HR admins, technical consultants, and scads of assistants, deputies, and flaks that are necessary for any self respecting bureaucracy. Where do you live, Utah?
We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.
I see this kind of thing all the time in public education. We all of a sudden have federal dollars that are earmarked for specific purposes (some of which are fine ideas in theory), but it takes so much more of the school’s resources that there are no funds available for the little things, like actually educating students.
Can’t wait to see what projects get pushed aside so that our state can whore itself for more federal dollars.
It is the goddamnedest thing about the knowers that know right up until they don’t know anymore and can’t imagine how things could have gotten so screwed up. “What did you do?”, they ask, never “What have I done?”
We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs.
Well I ain’t letting this gravy train pass me by, I am getting up bright and early tomorrow and filing for a business start up loan so I can start B Moe’s Light Bulb Changing Technician Training Center next year. You gotta stay ahead of the curve in this world, I’m telling you.