Federal Stimulus

On the issue of clean transportation, from transit to bike paths to clean water, few members of Congress are as knowledgeable or active as Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). Chief of the Congressional Bicycle Caucus and founder of the new Livable Communities Task Force, the Portland lawmaker is on the front lines of Washington's biggest infrastructure debates. Streetsblog Capitol Hill spoke with him yesterday about the prospects for transportation in the coming jobs bill, which he has said could be paid for in part with Wall Street bailout money. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

As Democrats in both chambers of Congress work on drafting new economic recovery legislation, they now have a preliminary list of how much spending can be set in motion on short notice: $15 billion for transit projects and $48 billion for highway projects.

The independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an economic analysis of the Obama administration's stimulus law this week, and one chart in particular (see below right, or a larger version here) is getting a lot of attention from bloggers, including Ezra Klein and Ryan Avent. 

Two-thirds of America's population, and more than three-quarters of its economic productivity, come from major cities. So why did the Obama administration's economic stimulus law end up giving metropolitan areas the short end of the stick?

Even as much of official Washington pauses for the holiday weekend, the congressional winds keep shifting in favor of a job-creation bill that aims to front-load infrastructure spending between next year and the 2012 election.

As the Obama administration today faced new criticism of its methods for tracking jobs created or saved by the $787 billion stimulus law, a bipartisan quartet of mayors was weighing in at the Brookings Institution about the recovery effort's impact on their local economies.

Any proposal to fund new U.S. infrastructure investment by taxing financial transactions -- such as Rep. Pete DeFazio's (D-OR) bill taxing Wall Street oil speculators -- would require international participation to prevent the trades in question from migrating overseas, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said today.

President Obama may be optimistic about continued U.S. economic growth as 2009 ends, but the reality on the ground in urban America -- which an estimated two-thirds of the population calls home -- is undeniably, disturbingly bleak.

Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and fellow lawmakers today pressed the Obama administration to take a more active role in ending the current political stalemate over federal transportation funding, but the sense of urgency they sought emerged only intermittently during an 80-minute session on infrastructure.