Repeating myself for the trillionth time here, but this country really does have some serious infrastructure issues. Stuff is old and deteriorating. Many of these repair jobs aren't especially complicated, though the longer they're deferred the more complicated and expensive they become. While paying people to dig holes and fill them up again would be better than not doing that, we're "fortunate" enough for there to be plenty of things that really should be done in this country. Someone just needs to get on the teevee and make the case.
The larger point about the usefulness of infrastructure spending at a time like this is obviously and importantly true. What bugs me is that last sentence. It isn't true that "someone" needs to get on the teevee and make the case as if "no-one" is there now. As it happens, people making this case are already on the teevee. Could there be more? Obviously, yes. But they are there, and among them, not infrequently, is the President, actually.
But however luminously rationally this case is made on the teevee it still faces monolithic Republican obstructionism, not to mention the obstruction of their kindred "conservative" Dems -- either because they are economic illiterates who don't understand Keynes or because they cynically prefer Friedmanian rationalizations for incumbent-elite interests.
To say that "somebody just needs to get on the teevee and makes the case," overlooks the actually enormously important fact that everybody making the case is on our side already and lots of assholes are fighting the folks on our side in ways that can't be circumvented "just" by "making the case." All the hard work of folks on our side -- and whether it is adequate enough or earnest enough is one thing worth debating but far from the only thing -- just sort of vanishes in formulations like this, and what remains is too often this diffuse demoralized despair that tars friend and foe alike and leaves one without any purchase on the field of struggle as it actually exists.
I love Atrios, but this sort of argument is just terribly frustrating to me and all too typical.
If either better arguments won the day or positions that reflected the objective interests or usually even the stated desires of majorities won the day, our side would already have won generations ago, Reagan would never have been elected, Gingrich wouldn't have done his mischief, Bush certainly wouldn't have gotten away with his putsch, and America would already be a sustainable social democracy on the Northern European model and we would be well on our way to solving global poverty and global warming by now.
I agree we should be making the case for public spending both because only accountable government can provide for certain public goods and because only government spending can get an economy moving again in a timely way when personal and private investing stalls at the zero bound, simply because Americans need to be educated about these things else they absolutely won't understand them, since they can seem counter-intuitive without real thought and hence are vulnerable to reactionary appeals to parochial intuitions that do not actually apply.
But I do not agree that nobody is making this case, and I do not agree that all one has to do is make it for the right policy outcome to arrive. To pretend that either of these things is true is ultimately to lay the blame on those who are doing their best to do the right thing, and change what would be an opportunity for education into a completely pointless and in fact deranging insinuation instead that those who come closest to doing what needs to be done by our own lights are instead doing nothing, or stealthfully refusing to do something, or doing the wrong thing when they obviously know better, and are more to be blamed for what isn't happening than those assholes who actively oppose us because they actively desire different, non-democratic, non-equitable, non-sustainable outcomes we abhor.
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