Not that it’s a high bar.
“I beat Obama by 22 months.” Actually, thanks to the president, there have been an abundance of shovel-ready jobs. Every speech he gives is a shovel-ready job. You need hip waders, too.
4 thoughts on “Smarter Than The President”
Comments are closed.
I was saying this during the election, when I noted that my single published law review article still put me ahead of Harvard Law Review President Obama.
I think we all knew that “shovel-ready” public works projects were not possible within a 4 year presidential term. I remember talking about this with people and the only possibility I could come up with that could at least be started within a 4 year period was to build lots of wind and solar farms on federal land in the western states because the feds could issue all kinds of code and regulation wavers on the basis of such projects being on federal land. I’m actually surprised they never tried this.
Its possible Obama could have been clueless about the intense amount of bureaucracy and approval processes needed to get, say, a new highway or urban train line approved for construction. However, its much more likely that this was just campaign rhetoric on his part.
As you can guess, California is even worse in this regard. The Century Freeway (I-105) took 15 years of jumping through bureaucratic hoops before the final approval came in 1985 to begin construction. The re-build of the east side of the Bay Bridge went through a 12 year approval process starting in 1991 before construction began in 2003.
The Portland area is little better. They have been trying to push through a project to build a new I-5 bridge across the Columbia river since ’06. They “plan” to begin construction in ’13. However, I think it likely that construction will not begin until ’14 or ’15. The bureaucratic phase of the I-5 bridge will take, at minimum, 7 years to complete.
Anyone who believes that FDR style public works projects could ever be used to get us out of a depression is clearly delusional.