Question to Republicans: Infrastucture & Job Creation
Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise,[1] or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function.[2] It can be generally defined as the set of interconnected structural elements that provide framework supporting an entire structure of development. It is an important term for judging a country or region’s development.
The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, bridges, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, and so forth, and can be defined as “the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions.”[3]
Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, and also the distribution of finished products to markets, as well as basic social services such as schools and hospitals; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to a factory.[4] In military parlance, the term refers to the buildings and permanent installations necessary for the support, redeployment, and operation of military forces.[5] To make it simple, infrastructure is anything that is needed everyday, an everyday item.
(Emphasis mine.)
So, serious question: how does having the government dump money into infrastructure projects not count as job creation? I mean, a lot of people would have to be hired to do all that work, right? I’m not being sarcastic, I honestly want to know why it doesn’t count for some reason.
Personally, I think if we could re-task, say, 5% of our current defense spending on infrastructure, we’d end up with a lot more national resilience to storms or attack, so it can be quite easily be described as “defense spending” without spin at all (think of Eisenhower and the Interstate Road System).
Heck, having advanced Japanese-style mag-lev bullet-trains would make it danged easy to move ground troops at nearly the speed of airlifts, wouldn’t it.
Oh well. I wonder.