Interstate Infrastructure

Ryan takes issue with Greg Mankiw’s contention that infrastructure is a local issue. Besides the Federal Governments Constitutional purview of Interstate Commerce, Mankiw is also wrong because political boundaries are often arbitrary, capricious or outdated.

Take the greater New York City area, which is composed of three states and at the very least 16 counties. As I’ve previously wrote about in The 51st State – State of New York City and Comparing NYC & Washington DC, it is more logical to think of the greater NYC area using both OMB and Census Bureau’s Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area than existing political boundaries. Currently the Census Bureau counts over 170 MSA’s ranging from Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA to Louisville-Jefferson County, KY-IN to Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY. You can even download a map of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United States and Puerto Rico, December 2006.

All of this is to reinforce that while infrastructure does have a local use component, the funding, design and policy aims of the greater American infrastructure network is decidedly Federal in nature and needs to be part of the larger political process.

Deep Thought – Infrastructure

If I was the head of a railway or transportation department at the local, county, regional or state level, I would make sure any Environmental Impact Reports and designed infrastructure projects were being polished up in the next 64 days to submit to Washington on 12:01 pm January 20th.

Urban Just Isn’t New York

I have to commend this post, Advocating for Urbanism and Ryan’s commentary, but I would like to make a tangential point brought forth from the second paragraph:

There is a certain vogue gathering around urban issues. No — not inner-city poverty, crime, or joblessness — but, rather, those issues that might broadly be described as ones of “human geography.” Where do people live, where do they work, and how should they travel between the two? How can resources, ranging from good schools to public transit to clean air, be more fairly allocated within regions?
Such questions have long been the provenance of a small group of left planning theorists such as James Howard Kunstler and Jane Jacobs. Their calls for denser, urban development were motivated as much by aesthetic concerns as by economic and environmental ones. And while it’s certainly true that strip malls and parking lots are eyesores, and that old buildings are often prettier than new ones, critics weren’t totally off the mark when they accused these thinkers of snobbishness; of a certain lack of compassion for the typical postwar middle-class family, lured by cheap real estate and good schools into a vastly expanding suburbia.

While I love Brooklyn, and New York in general, not everyone wishes or could live in the type of urban environment New Yorkers endure. I think it is very limiting to merely think of urban issues as issues only pertaining to Los Angeles or New York. Part of the job of whomever leads the President-elect’s future Office for Urban Policy, will be pursuing policies which respond to urban issues on many different scales and regions. Additionally, the Chair will have to cheerlead and make clear that urban doesn’t mean Brooklyn or Boston, but rather Cleveland and Chattanooga. The Chair must make clear to America that if they can throw a football (or baseball or stone) at a neighbor’s house, you live in an Urban environment. Enlarging the definition of Urbanity will be essential to saving the urban cores of America.

State Budget Deficits

Here is a list of state budget deficits:

  1. Arizona – $1,200 million
  2. California – $28,000 million
  3. Connecticut – $302 million
  4. Florida – $2,000 million
  5. Kansas – $1,000 million
  6. Kentucky – $294 million
  7. Missouri –
  8. New Hampshire – $372 million
  9. New Jersey – $1,200 million
  10. New York – $12,500 million ($47 billion in 2012)
  11. Rhode Island – $372 million
  12. South Carolina – $500 million
  13. Utah – $272 million

Thats over $42 billion in state budget deficits in the next 18 months. Some states such as New York are facing up to $47 billion in deficits alone through 2012.
Forget GM, we need to begin bailing out state budgets who, due to their constitutions, must balance their budgets. This means either raising taxes or cutting services. This doesn’t even include the quasi-public organizations such as the MTA which is forecasting a $900 million budget shortfall. I don’t know what the policy ramifications are of bailing out states are, since the Federal government can’t buy up shares of state government like in the bank buyouts.