Kevin Drum has joined the chorus, with "My Jobs Plan: A Trillion Dollars for Infrastructure:"
All of us have our fantasies about what we'd like President Obama to say in his big speech next week about jobs. Here's mine: ask Congress to appropriate a trillion dollars to be spent on infrastructure upgrades over the next five years. That's it. That's the jobs plan. A trillion dollars to make us into a first-world country again. And as part of the enabling legislation, ask for emergency powers to temporarily streamline the regulatory red tape, interagency approval processes, environmental-impact statements, and labor rules that might otherwise keep the money from being put to work speedily.
Will a Republican Congress agree to do this? Almost certainly not—at first, anyway. But building and repairing infrastructure is no boondoggle. It needs to be done, it needs to be done now, and it would be an easy sell to a public cynical about the government's ability to do anything concrete to help them. Make the case aggressively and you never know. Free money is free money, and even Republican voters like the idea of clean water, safe bridges, pipelines that don't blow up, electrical grids that work, and dams and schools that aren't crumbling.
So that's it. A trillion dollars for infrastructure. That's the plan. Let's do it.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Just much, much earlier.