Over on the homepage is a video with Chris Matthews titled, “Obama: ‘Too clever by half.’” Do give it a watch.
Summing it up: Matthews wants an infrastructure-jobs program from the president and goes on to talk about the need for improvements to our bridges, sewers, roads, etc.
Newsflash: That’s exactly what the first stimulus was supposed to be. Remember all that bunk about “shovel-ready jobs?” Until President Obama finally admitted that, holy smokes, “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as I expected.” Has something changed since June when the president said this? Of course not.
Here’s an idea, though. Create a mechanism to fast-track infrastructure projects and avoid costly regulatory and environmental delays. You can’t have both immediate jobs and an inane regulatory framework that prevents major projects from getting built. It’s also necessary to skip any project that doesn’t have a positive cost-benefit analysis absent government subsidies. Projects need to make sense, period.
And Rachel Maddow is the biggest abuser of this canard that there are big, giant infrastructure projects just waiting to be built with her multiple commercials for MSNBC with the great Hoover Dam in the background. Here’s how Wiki describes the environmental impact of the dam:
The changes in water use caused by Hoover Dam’s construction has had a large impact on the Colorado River Delta. The construction of the dam has been credited as causing the decline of this estuarine ecosystem.[98] For six years, after the construction of the dam and while Lake Mead filled, virtually no water reached the mouth of the river.[99] The delta’s estuary, which once had a freshwater-saltwater mixing zone stretching 40 miles (64 km) south of the river’s mouth, was turned into an inverse estuary where the level of salinity was higher close to the river’s mouth.[100]
The Colorado River had experienced natural flooding before the construction of the Hoover Dam. The dam eliminated the natural flooding, which imperiled many species adapted to the flooding, including both plants and animals.[101] The construction of the dam devastated the populations of native fish in the river downstream from the dam.[102] Four species of fish native to the Colorado River, the Bonytail chub, Colorado pikeminnow, Humpback chub, and Razorback sucker, are currently listed as endangered.[103][104]
You want to build a Hoover Dam today and put thousands of people to work? Fine. But you’ll have to admit that people are more important than fish, which is something today’s Left cannot do.