It's one thing to vote to strike a line item in the stimulus package. It's one thing to be against the stimulus altogether. It's one thing not to care about the environment, or biking, or anything good and wholesome in particular. But this is really a special level of ignorance/stupidity/malevolence from our favorite Senator, Jim DeMint:
I'm assuming that DeMint imagines that “real people” only drive to work, and that “bicycle, walking, or wilderness trails” don't actually get anyone to work, nor do they provide work in the making of them. We're not paying for any of that fun and games!
Your modern GOP: Not so modern.
Please share widely!
are a bunch of goddamn no-good hippies. Everybody knows that. They’re probably all smoking pot too, now that it’s legal in Taxachusetts. Oh, and they’re probably married to their gay lover, and they get free health insurance from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts, and … and … [Short-circuit caused by spittle leaking through keyboard into CPU forced the early termination of this comment. We regret the inconvenience.]
No worries, David. Here’s the rest of your comment.
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p>It’s another thing to be against marking funds for items that are not stimulative in the stimulus bill. There are legitimate arguments to be made against Senator DeMint’s conduct during the past week, but this is not one.
In terms of stimulative impact, spending $10,000 each on 100 different bike paths is the same as spending $1,000,000 on one small stretch of road.
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p>The difference, however, is that our nation is better equipped to deal with our difficulties in the 21st century by spending on the bike paths (see: climate change, dependency on foreign oil, obesity)
There’s no way that this is any less stimulative than highway work.
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p>For the record, JM Keynes wrote about paying some workers to dig holes and others to fill them up as stimulus. Just getting people working and earning income, which they would then invest in the economy, was the key.
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p>Bike paths, like other parts of the stimulus being rejected, would not only get people earning money, but they would create necessary infrastructure for a more sustainable and healthier society. Why exactly is that bad?
I see no evidence that infrastructure stimulus will have any benefit within a three year period (‘shovel ready’ equates to construction within 18 months; add an additional 18 months for stimulus to cycle through the economy).
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p>We should be improving infrastructure based on the merits of a project not because we have the false notion that it will be stimulative (plenty of empirical evidence supports this claim, but little disputes it). We need to swallow the pill that credit transfers, education and retraining programs, relocation support, and yes, tax cuts are actually stimulative and worry about infrastructure down the road, or, bike path.
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p>PS. Its nice to see another Fields Corner resident here!
… be lost in the next 2 to 3 months depending on the funding disposition of infrastructure projects. Don’t forget that in the construction industry, planning the size of your workforce depends on seeing what work might be out there down the pipe.
Where—who would use them? What % of our population uses bikes? How do you get to these bike paths—burn gas? Who will police these bike paths when the perv’s show up to accost women as well as men? Will Montana, Idaho, Minnesota, N Dakota get a chance at the bike path money? Will New York City have bike paths in central park? Downtown Philly or Los Angeles?
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p>Please!
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p>They do great in Boston — Esplanade, Mem Drive path, Emerald Necklace. They also do great in the suburbs, a la the Minuteman Bike Path.
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p>Who would use them? 2,000,000 people a year use the Minuteman path (source). Some use them for recreation and fitness, some as transit. People use the Minuteman Path in conjunction with the Red Line to do a car free commute, or bypass the Red Line altogether and just ride to and from downtown Cambridge or Boston. Of course, loads of commuters use the Boston/Cambridge paths. All of them are not using as much fuel, not using auto parking spaces, not using space on the road.
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p>Who will police the roads when pervs use them? Who will police the public parks when pervs use them? Who will police anywhere where pervs may be?
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p>Sometimes. Sometimes not. As the number of quality bike paths increase, people who are driving to them will have to drive a shorter distance, or be able to ride their bikes to them safely.
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p>Of course. They’ve got urban areas, and they’ve got local, state and national parks. Why shouldn’t they encourage cycling in those areas?
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p>They already have them near 65th and 102nd, in addition to a bike lane on “the loop”. (map)
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p>Absolutely. Those are two places which would have the density to support bike paths for commuting, and have the demand for recreational facilities. Why not?
Any government spending is stimulative. Some kinds of spending, Keynesian theory says, have different “multipliers”: the amount of GDP growth you get per dollar spent varies. Since the point of stimulus is to raise the GDP by a certain amount, that does matter. However, pretty much any spending that falls into the broad categories of “infrastructure”, “building stuff”, “employing people”, or “giving people money directly”, has the highest theoretical multipliers. It does not matter what it is spent on. If all you’re discussing is “stimulative effect”, spending a billion dollars on a highway, on building a school, on building bike paths, or merely hiring people to sit in empty rooms all day being bored out of their skulls, is equally effective. It’s $1 billion worth of high-multiplier GDP stimulus.
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p>Now, in a different sense, of course it does matter what we spend on. If we’re going to spend a lot of money, we have an opportunity to get useful things as a side effect after all that spending and economic stimulating is done. If you spend a billion dollars on people sitting in empty rooms, you do get $1 billion of short term stimulus, but nothing more. If you spend that same $1 billion on building useful things or employing people to do useful things, you get $1 billion worth of short term high multiplier stimulus, plus something else for the long run: A highway, or a school, or some bike paths, or whatever.
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p>Clearly, some people can argue about which of these things have value. Clearly, some Republicans don’t think bike paths contribute to anyone’s quality of life.
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p>However, that debate has nothing to do with “stimulative effect”.