Public pays price for privatization
There is a dignity in the Hoover Dam, a massiveness that speaks to a grand national purpose. A country — our country — decided to build it. As the Hoover Dam was constructed, in the middle of the Great Depression, the nearby city of Las Vegas stretched itself from a sleepy town of 5,000 to accommodate tens of thousands of new residents: the people building the dam and staffing the associated businesses.
In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower embarked on the most aggressive public works project in U.S. history — the jobs-producing interstate highway system. And throughout the 1930s and ’40s, the government designed an elaborate set of public financing vehicles to build the great postwar suburban housing stock.
Continue ReadingAmerica used to be a country that built things — using public and private resources. Great works of infrastructure provided jobs and returned an incredible social investment. It is inconceivable to imagine the modern economy without the vast investments in infrastructure made by preceding generations — everything from rural electrification to
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