Your tax-deductible gift will help bring promising new voices and ideas into our nation's discourse, and help shape the future of vital public policies.
American Infrastructure Initiative
Steve Coll, President of the New America Foundation, explains the logic of infrastructure investment in The New Yorker. In Salon, Michael Lind calls a national infrastructure bank Obama's first priority. Sherle Schwenninger, Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program, joins other experts in discussing infrastructure at a conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future on November 18. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and Chairman of the Board of the New America Foundation, calls for new infrastructure investments as part of an economic stimulus program.
Economic growth, global competitiveness and middle-class prosperity in America all depend on a national infrastructure that is state-of-the-art, energy efficient, environmentally sound and secure. The American Infrastructure Initiative, co-sponsored by the Economic Growth Program and the Next Social Contract Program and directed by Whitehead Senior Fellow Michael Lind, provides informed commentary about America's infrastructure needs and analyzes specific proposals for funding and building the next American infrastructure.
Launch of the Heartland Development Bank
Sept. 12, 2008 -- Opportunities for productive investments in energy, agriculture and manufacturing infrastructure across America's heartland have been squandered. In response to this neglect, the New America Foundation proposes the creation of a Heartland Development Bank (HDB).
The Heartland Development Bank would be funded with $10-25 billion to improve to the railways, highways, and waterways needed to export agriculture, develop electric lines to move wind and solar energy from the heartland to the coast, and support infrastructure to make high value added manufacturing more competitive.
To read the HDB report, click here.
To read the initial proposal, click here.
With official unemployment in the US hovering around 10 per cent,
and actual levels much higher when the underemployed and discouraged
are counted, the most urgent priority is job creation. But efforts to
get America working again must be informed by the striking fact that
most employment growth in the past decade has been concentrated in
three sectors: healthcare, education and government, mostly state and
local public services.
Now and then a
moment occurs that clarifies the nature of American politics like a
flash of lightning over a prairie landscape. Such a moment occurred on
Sept. 9 during President Obama's televised address to a joint session
of Congress about healthcare. As the president explained that illegal
immigrants would not be eligible for benefits under the plan he
supported, Joe Wilson, a conservative Republican member of Congress
from South Carolina, shocked the chamber and the television audience by
shouting, "You lie!"
"We had to
struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial
monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,
sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an
audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider
the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own
affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as
dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our
history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they
Can there be liberalism without labor? Can a progressive movement exist
in a country in which organized labor has lost its political influence?
My friend Mark Schmitt, the executive editor of the American Prospect, asks that question:
Green investment is a major pillar of the president's economic recovery plan. Yet, America's dependence on foreign countries to produce green technologies may undermine this recovery strategy. Using a list of green goods derived from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), we have determined that the United States ran an overall green trade deficit of -$8.9 billion in 2008, including a deficit of -$6.4 billion in the critical category of renewable energy,… more
Chairman, Oberstar, Representative Mica, and Members of the
Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today on the question of "financing
infrastructure investments."
Over the past several decades, we have accumulated a
sizeable public infrastructure deficit.
As a result, a variety of infrastructure bottlenecks-traffic congested
roads, clogged ports, and an antiquated air traffic system, to mention just a
few-have begun to undercut our economy's efficiency and undermine our quality
of life.
America’s basic infrastructure is outdated, worn, and in some cases, failing. Most experts agree that it is inadequate for meeting the demands of the 21st-century global economy. If we are to remain competitive, we must invest in capital assets like roads, ports, bridges, mass transit, water systems, and broadband infrastructure. Many other countries -- both rich and poor -- see investing in infrastructure as imperative for economic survival and success in an increasingly competitive economic environment. But the United States… more
