Are lack of loans to private contractors to blame for chronic unemployment?

[lumberjack_jeff]

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/08/02/transcript-of-obamas-remarks-on-debt-ceiling-bill/?mod=google_news_blog

We also need to give more opportunities to all those construction workers out there who lost their jobs when the housing boom went bust. We could put them to work right now, by giving loans to private companies that want to repair our roads and our bridges and our airports, rebuilding our infrastructure. We have workers who need jobs and a country that needs rebuilding; an infrastructure bank would help us put them together.

If only Bechtel could get government loans, they'd hire all the workers imaginable. :think:

[PVnRT]

1. That doesn't make much sense

Rebuilding infrastructure isn't done by just anyone who wants to do it. A government entity has to bid out contracts to construction companies who then do the work. Bechtel (as an example) can't just go to the President and say, "Give us a $1 billion dollar loan so that we can rebuild a couple of bridges." Whoever wrote this has no idea how infrastructure development/repair works.

We have workers and a country that needs rebuilt - that means we need government spending to rebuild things, not some bank handing out loans to companies who can't do the work without a contract first.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. The president wrote it and said it. n/t

[jwirr]

3. It seems to me that government has always been behind infrastructure

building - REA, the big dams, airports, roads, etc. The only infrastructure I can think of that was started without government was railroads. And even then I suspect there was some help. It is not private borrowing that is keeping the infrastructure in a mess it is government. And it is my understanding that the rethugs have blocked every jobs bill presented.

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. Yes. For purposes of this discussion, infrastructure is public.

Bechtel's new office building? Not infrastructure.

[PVnRT]

6. The government helped the railroads mostly through right-of-way

My memory's hazy, but I believe that the railroads got a lot of sweetheart deals on land.

[jwirr]

7. Yes, now I remember. In our area they own a lot of that land even now. nt

[readmoreoften]

4. No. But a neoliberal might think that.