The problem with the infrastructure argument is that firstly it conflates the marginal and the inframarginal. Obviously an economy needs a certain amount of infrastructure to thrive but once it reaches that point the marginal return to each succeeding amount of infrastructure keeps getting smaller until the returns are negative. For example if a kid is suffering from malnutrition and has weak bones giving that kid milk might fix his bones. But once his bones are fixed giving him a gallon of milk a day won’t turn him into Wolverine, it will just make him fat.
Do you really think that people are not making investments because they are worried a bridge is going to collapse under their trucks when they make a shipment? The civil engineering society is always going to say infrastructure needs work because civil engineers are going to be the ones doing the work. Relying on them to grade infrastructure is like relying on a toddler to tell you how much candy should be in their diet, the answer will always be more.
Secondly the types of infrastructure that you mention, wifi, satellites, bullet trains, are ill matched to the types of people that need jobs. The people most affected by the recession were people of low education. The unemployment rate among those with a bachelors degree or higher is 3.7.% These are the people who will be constructing communication satellites and installing WiFi. The type of infrastructure that may benefit the economy is not at all the type that could use the excess labor. It would be great if there was a way to transform an unemployed sheet rocker into a network architecture specialist, but there just is not and no amount of money spent is going to change that.
Then who would you suggest we go to to determine how good or bad our infrastructure is? This is like saying we shouldn’t trust bankers to give us financial advice since they’ll look to profit from it or go to military leaders for strategic and tactical advice since they’ll be hungry for war.
Jobs won’t be just created by construction of these infrastructure (I’d had nuclear power plants too) but by jobs related to them-for example manufacturing its components or jobs to feed and house the workers for example. And some of these infrastructure would also create new jobs-for example a national high speed rail service job would create positions for conductors, cooks, etc.
Fortunately, as long as we have infrastructure and entropy, there will be a need for maintenance and repair work. So there will always be work for civil engineers. And if you let things get bad enough, then the projects will be bigger. Like the Fram oil filter guy used to say: “You can pay me now (for an oil change), or you can pay me later (for an engine rebuild/replacement).”
The thing about maintenance is that it’s very necessary and not sexy at all. You don’t get political points for managing things well and keeping things maintained. No one notices that. So politicians have to either back sexy new projects or scream that they’re protecting everyone from the sky falling. Talk to them about proper maintenance and they put more and more things off for more and more years while using the money for something that may be useful (although it probably gives us something more to maintain), but that, more importantly, is something that they can brag about. Hence the report card. It allows politicians to break down and do maintenance.
So it would appear.
But the answer is always going to be “yes” anyway. If there’s money available for capital projects, someone can always find something. I don’t know what condition your house is in, but if I gave you $1 million to spend on home repair and improvement I’m sure you’d find $1 million worth of stuff to do. Perhaps not $1 trillion worth, but you’re also not a country of 300,000,000 people.
I might point out that we did not bomb Pearl Harbor, nor did we invade the Soviet Union, nor did we bomb Coventry and London. We did not start WW2, nor did we win it single handedly, but we provided serious material support to the USSR, manpower and shipping in the European Theater, though we did much of the heavy lifting in the Pacific to help the european colonies and commonwealths there.
Hm, looking at my dependant ID card, I get to use thebase theater, thecommisary and exchange units, ooo the booze store:p and base hospital. I do get my meds free on base as long as they stock the ones I need. I get Tri-Care, which is more or less the military HMO that lets me use either the docs and services in the base hospital free, or offbase docs and hospitals at different amounts of co-pay. And mrAru gets a munificent half base pay for E6 over 20, or a whopping $1521 a month before taxes. All for 20 years spent in the submarine fleet. Oh, and we get to chuckle at the crap they put in movies and TV about navy and sub life. 
I wouldn’t trust bankers who told me to put all my money in his bank or a real estate agent who told me now was the best time to buy a house. the Federal Highway Administratin says that 57% of passenger miles were traveled on roads judged “good” or better, which up 9% from 2000. The number of interstates rated poor has gone done dramatically since 2000, the number of bridges deemed deficient has also shrunk dramatically, and the number of overcrowded highways has gone done. Infrastructure has never been better in this country. The US already spend 3.3% of GDP on infrastructure. I think more should go to maintenance and not new highways but that is a problem with political priorities of legislators not lack of money.
It would be cheaper to find 1,000 cooks and give them each a million dollars. Nationwide HSR is a horrifically bad idea for obvious reasons.
The trouble with the Obama "green energy"disaster was that much of it involves imported stuff-like the windmills-generators from Korea, gearboxes from China, etc. Solar is even worse-most of the panels are from china. So the green energy initiative was mostly Chine stimulus program
In wasn’t until FDR launched a massive jobs and spending program in 1941 that the economy turned around.
The economy is not a bathtub full of water. Unless it’s magic water that grows when you swirl it around. One of the issues during a recession is that private enterprise stops investing and spending money because people don’t have money to spend. So if the private sector isn’t spending, then the only place for spending to come is from public sector spending. It’s not sustainable forever. But it is often a better alternative to austerity measures just as it’s often better to live off your credit card until you find a job rather than go homeless and starve because you don’t have income.
Those improvements happened because we spent money on roads to improve them or build new ones (I’m curious where you got the numbers tho’).
And why would nationwide HSR be a horrible idea?
All those improvements happened without a huge new push for infrastructure spending. Furthermore the economy of 2000 has at the height of the internet bubble and did not suffer at all due to infrastructure worse than our current infrastructure.
HSR is a horrible idea, because it is economically feasible only in dense areas such as the northeast and in those areas it is practically impossible because you have to buy so much land in a dense and expensive part of the country.
indeed-if we were to build these boondoggles, nobody would ride them. We are now in a position to restructure our work around staying at home and working via the Internet. Going back to the 1950’s commuter model would be a huge mistake.
Which explains why Yahoo, Best Buy and HP have all pulled back on their home workers program. I think we’ve discovered that working from home is a cool option, but we aren’t going to ever completely get away from the 1950s commuter model - when companies are in trouble, they want people present and feeling like a team. My former firm generally laid off employees who worked from home before they laid off people who were in the office. It may have simply been bias, but when the company had a bad quarter, you’d see people who normally telecommuted a few days a week spend more days in the office.
The next step in business evolution is for companies to watch those companies pull a rabbit and turn themselves around and say “hey, if having people show up in the office turned an unprofitable company into a profitable one, imagine what it could do to our profitable company.”
I think we are at a pivotal moment in work from home - it may become more obscure over the next ten years - and that has nothing to do with how long it takes to commute or what sort of infrastructure we have.
HSR has nothing to do with commuting. Its purpose in California is to offer a faster way of getting between LA and the Bay Area. Flying is a pain, and driving takes a long time. (I do it fairly frequently.)
If you doubt the benefit of public transit, just look at the chaos during the first BART strike. I live in Silicon Valley, and if there has been a major reduction in traffic from work at home I haven’t seen it. Traffic is highly dependent on the economy. I’m happy to say it is getting much worse now. But companies are pulling away from working at home. It is great for isolated type jobs like freelance writer, but not so hot if you need to interact with people.