And what’s all this theatrical outrage over the national mall’s lawn? Would you not have to do the following:
– rent or purchase machinery to prepare the soil
– hire someone to prepare the soil
– purchase irrigation parts from suppliers (hopefully not Chinese)
– purchase sod from a farmer
– purchase fertilizer (also from a farmer?)
– pay a trucker to ship the sod/fertilizer/irrigation parts to the mall
– hire irrigation installers
– hire someone to lay the sod
– hire someone to maintain it
Are these not jobs? How is this not stimulative? Can someone opposed to this explain why? I haven’t heard a good argument against it accept for the talking heads on TV saying “that’s not jobs, that’s a pork barrel pet project.”
And as Obama said in his speech today, why wouldn’t we want to modernize the nation’s fleet of vehicles? Imagine replacing the entire fleet with fuel-efficient cars. Say they get 10mpg more than the current fleet of cars — how many billions in fuel costs would that save this country over a 5-10 year span, not to mention the manufacturing jobs that would be saved or created by such a large order?
I just can’t for the life of me understand why any rational person would see the modernization of our nation’s fleet as bad for this country. Can anyone explain this to me? I am genuinely curious.
