Quote Originally Posted by flowerseverywhere View Post
I wanted to comment on a small portion of your comments. I recently went on two road trips and I saw construction everywhere of roads and bridges. I was actually quite surprised at how much construction was going on in especially in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and NY.

also, there is a lot of power development going on in NY. The whole marcellus shale/hydrofracking controversy along with the development of windmill farms is moving along. Also, there is a new streamlined process for Nuclear power plants and several actually have the possibility of being started in the next few years after a very long moratorium on new plant building.

"President Obama today said that safe, new nuclear power plants are a “necessity” as he announced more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to build the first nuclear power plant in three decades. "

that is from a speech in Feb 2010
I'm very happy to know that there is activity, at least in some areas. What I had in mind is something exponentially larger in scope. Somewhat along the lines of the CCC back in the 30's. Literally putting millions of people to work with new projects. It would have to be federally administered, or at least under the federal umbrella, simply because of the scope. Individual states don't have the resources to take it on.

A few million in highway repairs or a few billion in new nuke plants won't get us there. I've seen estimates on the various parts of the program floating around for years. To build a smart grid credible estimates range from $1 or $2 trillion up to $8 trillion. Building a network of new nuke plants along with retrofitting existing plants with control systems to match the new could easily be $1 trillion. I really haven't seen overall estimates to bring our rail system up to speed, but you've got to guess that between laying new track, building new terminals and bridges and fixing up all the old stuff it wouldn't be that hard to spend a trillion bucks. There are estimates that say half of the highway bridges in the county need work and a quarter of them are not even safe any more. As you observed back east, there is some work going on around me, but no where near that estimated level so the total of that work nationally would probably rival the smart grid for cost.

And all that doesn't even touch on developing domestic natural gas, clean coal, significant solar and wind, etc. What about urban renewal? Increased band width, fiber optic lines and all the other information grid components? There is no shortage of areas that need attention and probably no limit to what it would cost to fix or build everything. I'm not slamming Mr. Obama for doing nothing, I'm more fed up with the lack of vision in Washington overall. Even worse, anyone with vision and the guts to talk about all of this would be squashed by the system there. To complete the full circle, maybe Congress is the very first thing we need to fix so we can get started on the rest.