American Infrastructure Initiative: Latest Articles

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital,

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 12, 1809. President Barack Obama will celebrate it by speaking at a banquet in Lincoln's adopted hometown of Springfield, Ill. Obama has consciously and consistently sought to identify himself with his fellow Illinois politician, by launching his campaign in Springfield and taking a train, like Lincoln, to his inauguration.

Michael Lind is director of the American Infrastructure Initiative at the New America Foundation.  

There are worrying signs that what may end up being a stimulus package of a trillion dollars or more is being turned into an ordinary piece of legislation, with its content to be determined by politics, special interests and ideology.

Barack Obama is a man with a plan. On Dec. 6, the president-elect announced major parts of his plan to revitalize the American economy. He listed four priorities: "a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient"; "the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s"; "the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.

In the past generation Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi and I, in different ways, have used the idea of "republics" to understand American history. Since the French Revolution, France has been governed by five republics (plus two empires, a directory and a fascist dictatorship). Since the American Revolution, we Americans have been governed… more