James McCormack writes: One of the most prominent questions concerning the global economy today is whether monetary policy is approaching the limit of its effectiveness. Inflation remains well below target in the eurozone and Japan, despite aggressive quantitative easing (QE) and negative policy interest rates, and both the euro and yen have appreciated against the US dollar since the start of the year.

The problem with the debate is that it has focused solely on the effectiveness of policies, without considering the need for prudence. The credibility and independence of monetary authorities are essential to the effectiveness of their policies. And yet some of the proposals being fielded call for central banks to stray further into uncharted territory, expanding and extending their deviation from careful balance-sheet management. This could inflict reputational damage that may be difficult to rectify, with real financial and economic consequences.

Structural reforms to support growth typically have long gestation periods, and the economic dislocations that accompany them reduce their political appeal.

An old idea, first proposed by Milton Friedman in 1969, is making a comeback: “helicopter money.” Advocates envisage central banks creating money and distributing it directly to those who would spend it, resulting in immediate increases in demand and inflation.

The direct funding by central banks of fiscal deficits or purchases of government debt would result in the monetization of fiscal policy. Monetization unambiguously weakens central banks’ balance sheets by adding assets that carry no real value (claims on government that will never be repaid), offset by liabilities (newly created money) generated to acquire them.

Advocates of helicopter money rely on two claims. Some believe that policy can be calibrated to stop short of inflicting meaningful harm, usually because the resulting improvement in economic conditions will obviate the need for continued stimulus. For others, central banks’ balance sheets are not a constraint, because the exclusive ability to create additional unlimited and cost-free liabilities guarantees long-term profitability.

There are problems with both claims. Relying on a calibrated approach counts on stimulus being withdrawn before any evidence of concern over the central bank’s finances appears. But there is no certainty that monetized fiscal spending will spark an economic recovery.

Nor can it be known beforehand that expansionary fiscal policy would be curtailed if economic prospects do not improve. In fact, in the absence of negative public or market commentary on central-bank finances, the fiscal authorities may be tempted to expand their use of cost-free funding in what looks from their perspective very much like the proverbial “free lunch.”

There are also serious reasons to doubt the claim that seigniorage – the profit to central banks from having zero-cost liabilities (and at least some income-generating assets) – would guarantee profitability in the long term. Never in the post-gold standard era has there been greater focus on the limits of monetary policy. This focus could easily turn to the health of central banks’ balance sheets if they continue to expand. The concept of seigniorage is poorly understood outside a relatively small community; it should not be used as the first line of defense.

None of this comes as news to central banks, which attach the utmost importance to their reputation for having robust finances, carefully managing risk, and ensuring the soundness of money. Indeed, the financial prudence that underpins policy credibility and confidence in central banks is ultimately what makes seigniorage possible. Only institutions that are perceived as financially viable can expect their liabilities to be held by others as assets; central banks are no exception.

At stake is the value of money. Helicopter money would transfer risk from governments’ balance sheets to those of central banks, blurring the lines between policies, institutions, and their relative autonomy. Its appeal lies in being able to exploit the unique financial structures of central banks.

At a time of heightened sensitivity to the implementation and effectiveness of monetary policy, it would be a mistake to embark on a path that jeopardizes central banks’ very viability.

Ishah   writes:  Nearly two years after oil prices began their precipitous decline, leading global producers are facing the prospect of major adjustments that will have far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences.

It seems that Saudi Arabia has embraced this challenge. This week, it issued its  VIsion 2030  plan for ensuring sustainable long-term growth. One key way Saudi Arabia hopes to achieve growth is by diversifying its asset portfolio, selling shares in the state oil giant Aramco to create a sovereign-wealth fund.

But Vision 2030 fails to address one critical issue: low labor-force participation. Only 41% of the working-age population is currently employed.

The key will be not just to increase employment, but also to boost productivity. After all, unlike more sparsely populated Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, such as the UAE and Qatar, Saudi Arabia, with its population of nearly 20 million (excluding non-nationals), can no longer afford low labor productivity. Indeed, oil revenues now amount to only $5,500 per capita – far from enough to act as a sustainable alternative.

The Kingdom’s underlying political settlement depends on the royal family’s alliances with businesses, which have a free hand to import labor, and guaranteed public-sector jobs for citizens.

This settlement is traceable to the 1970s, when ambitious infrastructure programs turned local trading families into contractors, which then lobbied for more visas to staff up.

As a result, the Kingdom’s reliance on foreigners has no parallel in modern economic history.  In few other countries would nationals accept such open competition by foreign labor. Saudi nationals do, because they are employed by the state at above-market “reservation” wages.

But whenever the Kingdom has tried to reduce public-sector hiring, unemployment has increased. Under the current incentives system, the authorities’ plans to privatize companies and improve civil-service productivity will actually destroy jobs occupied by Saudis.

The challenge of creating jobs for Saudis may seem like a problem of riches. Some would argue that all the Kingdom needs to do is to substitute Saudi for foreign workers in existing positions. But simple substitution will not do. Current jobs are either too skill-intensive or not skill-intensive enough.

Structural change will be needed to upgrade manual jobs. Greater reliance on capital and technology will also eliminate many menial positions. At the same time, many high-skill jobs, largely a product of massive energy and capital subsidies, need to be downgraded to create more medium-skill positions.

The Kingdom has thus embarked on a “Saudization” program that requires businesses in some sectors to hire nationals. So far, the private sector has largely resisted these policies.

More than 200,000 young people enter the labor market annually. And as education levels continue to rise – nearly two-thirds of Saudi youth go to university – social pressure is set to grow as well.

The real constraint to job creation in Saudi Arabia is found in its particular political economy. With lower oil rents to share, the domestic social contract is coming under strain. Cutting support for either businessmen or the population will weaken it further.

How the ruling House of Saud will adjust remains uncertain.

Investigative journalists in radio and print in Cologne, Germany have joined forces to explore whether or not Big Pharma has colluded with regulatory authorities to suggest that expensive modern drugs to thin blood are any more effective than cheap aspirin.

Critical questions are sometimes obscured by arguments over the price of drugs.  Are expensive drugs necessary at all.  In the US, pediatricians now prescribe saline solutions for colds and low-grade bronchial coughs.  Salt in water is too easy a solution to a problem for which Big Pharma has come up with expensive solutions.  Many doctors in the US gives tiny doses of peanuts to children with potentially lethal peanut allergies.  Foremost US expert Dr. Hugh Sampson is chief scientific officer of a French company that is developing an expensive patch.  While the patch awaits US regulatory approval, Sampson and others declare peanuts themselves to be unsafe. Are they?  Or are they too cheap?

Now German investigative journalists are exploring blood thinners, which may even harm people.  They are probably no more effective than cheap aspirin.

More than halfway through his five-year term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—expected to be the first of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening crackdown on civil society and promotion of a cult of personality have disappointed many observers, both Chinese and foreign, who saw him as destined by family heritage and life experience to be a liberal reformer. Many thought Xi must have come to understand the dangers of Party dictatorship from the experiences of his family under Mao’s rule. His father, Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002), was almost executed in an inner-Party conflict in 1935, was purged in another struggle in 1962, was “dragged out” and tortured during the Cultural Revolution, and was eased into retirement after another Party confrontation in 1987.

Both father and son showed a commitment to reformist causes throughout their careers. Once Xi acceded to top office he was widely expected to pursue political liberalization and market reform. Instead he has reinstated many of the most dangerous features of Mao’s rule: personal dictatorship, enforced ideological conformity, and arbitrary persecution.

The key to this paradox is Xi’s seemingly incongruous veneration of Mao. With respect to Xi’s purge in 1962, the biography blames Mao’s secret police chief, Kang Sheng, rather than Mao himself, and claims that Mao protected Xi by sending him to a job in a provincial factory safely away from the political storms in Beijing. Xi’s respect for Mao is not a personal eccentricity. It is shared by many of the hereditary Communist aristocrats form most of China’s top leadership today as well as a large section of its business elite. Deng Xiaoping in 1981 declared that Mao’s contributions outweighed his errors by (in a Chinese cliché) “a ratio of 7 to 3.”

Their reverence for Mao is different from the simple nostalgia of former Red Guards and sent-down youth who hazily remember a period of adolescent idealism.  The children of the founding elite see themselves as the inheritors of an “all-under-heaven,” a vast world that their fathers conquered under Mao’s leadership. Their parents came from poor rural villages and rose to rule an empire. The second generation is privileged to live in a country that has “stood up” and is globally respected and feared. They do not propose to be the generation that “loses the empire.”

It is this logic that drives Liu Yuan, the son of former president Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao purged and sent to a miserable death, to support Xi in reviving Maoist ideas and symbolism; and the same logic has moved the offspring of many of Mao’s other prominent victims to form groups that celebrate Mao’s legacy, like the Beijing Association of the Sons and Daughters of Yan’an and the Beijing Association to Promote the Culture of the Founders of the Nation.¹

Xi holds office at a time when the regime has to confront a series of daunting challenges that have all reached critical stages at once. It must manage a slowing economy; mollify millions of laid-off workers; shift demand from export markets to domestic consumption; whip underperforming giant state-owned enterprises into shape; dispel a huge overhang of bad bank loans and nonperforming investments; ameliorate climate change and environmental devastation that are irritating the new middle class; and downsize and upgrade the military. Internationally, Chinese policymakers see themselves as forced to respond assertively to growing pressure from the United States, Japan, and various Southeast Asian regimes that are trying to resist China’s legitimate defense of its interests in such places as Taiwan, the Senkaku islands, and the South China Sea

Any leader who confronts so many big problems needs a lot of power, and Mao provides a model of how such power can be wielded. Xi Jinping leads the Party, state, and military hierarchies by virtue of his chairmanship of each. But his two immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, exercised these roles within a system of collective leadership, in which each member of the Politburo Standing Committee took charge of a particular policy or institution and guided it without much interference from other senior officials.

Xi emulates Mao in exercising power through a tight circle of aides whom he can trust because they have demonstrated their personal loyalty in earlier phases of his career, such as Li Zhanshu, director of the all-powerful General Office of the CCP Central Committee.

Xi has also followed Mao’s model in protecting his rule against a coup. His anticorruption campaign has made him numerous enemies. Xi has tightened direct control over the military by means of what is called a “[Central Military Commission] Chairman Responsibility System,” and he controls the central guard corps—which monitors the security of all the other leaders—through his longtime chief bodyguard, Wang Shaojun.³ In these ways Xi controls the physical environment of the other leaders, just as Mao did through his loyal follower Wang Dongxing.

Xi conveys Napoleonic self-confidence in the importance of his mission and its inevitable success. In person he is said to be affable and relaxed. But his carefully curated public persona follows Mao in displaying a stolid presence and immobile features that seem to convey either stoicism or implacability.

Above all, Xi has followed Mao in the demand for ideological conformity.  Xi wants “rule by law,” but this means using the courts more energetically to carry out political repression and change the bureaucracy’s style of work. He wants to reform the universities, not in order to create Western-style academic freedom but to bring academics and students to heel (including those studying abroad). He has launched a thorough reorganization of the military, which is intended partly to make it more effective in battle, but also to reaffirm its loyalty to the Party and to him personally. The overarching purpose of reform is to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power.

He may go even further. There are hints that he will seek to break the recently established norm of two five-year terms in office and serve one or even more extra terms.

Xi’s concentration of power poses great dangers for China.

Why are Germans protesting the Transatlantic Trade Agreement?  They say the deal would drive down wages, and weaken environmental protection and labour rights.

US President Barack Obama – who is pushing hard for the agreement – says it would create millions of jobs and increase trade by lowering tariffs. He visits the northern city to open a huge trade fair.

German police estimate that more than 30,000 took part in the peaceful protest rally in Hannover.

Many carried placards with slogans that read: “Stop TTIP!”

The demonstrators have also been voicing their anger over the secrecy surrounding the ongoing TTIP negotiations.

“The TTIP between the American continent and Europe is very dangerous for the democracy, for our nature and for the rights of the workers,” protester Florian Rohrich told the BBC.

“The rights in America for workers are much lower. It’s like the Trojan horse. They can’t change our whole system. But they will – because TTIP is written by the groups, by the companies, not by the politicians,” he added.

The negotiations were launched three years ago, and the next round is due to open on Monday in New York.

Defending the TTIP, President Obama has said that the agreement would mean “new growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic”.

The TTIP aims to cut tariffs and regulatory barriers to trade between the US and EU countries, making it easier for companies on both sides of the Atlantic to access each other’s markets.

Industries it would affect include pharmaceuticals, cars, energy, finance, chemicals, clothing and food and drink.

Earlier this month, the price of a first-class stamp fell for the first time since 1919. The drop, from forty-nine cents to forty-seven cents, took place following the expiration of a rate surcharge that was enacted in 2014 to help the U.S. Postal Service deal with the aftereffects of the Great Recession. The dip likely won’t matter much to most consumers, but it amounts to a loss of about two billion dollars a year for an organization that lost 5.1 billion dollars in the 2015 fiscal year alone.

Despite the service’s evident money problems, squeezing two more cents out of each letter may seem, to some, like just about the laziest possible way to raise revenue. Contrast that with postal services in other countries, many of which are managing to reinvent themselves: last year, the Singapore Post has opened an e-commerce branch that sells consulting services to companies hoping to reach Asian customers; elsewhere, Australia’s postal service is reportedly testing drone delivery, and Italy’s sells mobile-phone services.

Why does the U.S.P.S. seem to be so comparatively uncreative? Some post offices are offering smaller-scale postal services—an approach that countries like Germany have taken, to good effect. Share Mail allows marketers and political campaigns to send pre-paid flyers or pamphlets that you can forward to friends. “Just like social networking,” he said. To me, it sounded more like the U.S.P.S. was working to make junk mail even more annoying—a hunch that was reinforced when I learned that advertising now makes up more than half of the mail that is delivered. Most of the innovation taking place at the postal service seems to be aimed either at downsizing or making its remaining customers marginally happier, rather than creating new revenue streams by anticipating what Americans might actually want.

The postal service was once central to our social, financial, and intellectual lives. A working paper published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that post offices were crucial to American innovation. The researchers, who studied the relationship between the number of post offices in a given county and the number of patents filed there, found data suggesting that, from 1804 to 1899—a rich period of invention in the U.S.—the establishment of new post offices made people living nearby likelier to file patents. The authors considered several potential reasons for this, from the obvious fact that being near a post office made it easier to file a patent application to the idea that post offices served as a kind of proto-Internet, helping to distribute information to and from counties fortunate enough to have access to them.

The postal service is no longer as significant a manifestation of state power, of course. But the U.S.P.S. still has infrastructural might, in the form of a highly interconnected network of well-placed buildings and people. So here’s a thought experiment: What if we were to reconceive the postal system in light of that network? What more could the service do with its infrastructure?

There is actually an agency within the U.S.P.S. that has been thinking about these questions. Employees could, for example, deliver groceries, alert social-services agencies when people on their routes need help, or, even more ambitiously, supply “wellness services.”

Other proposals from the inspector general’s office would take advantage of the postal service’s buildings—for instance, by allowing post offices to provide basic financial services, like cashing checks, keeping savings accounts, and even taking out small loans. Countries such as Brazil, China, and New Zealand have been doing this for years.

The U.S.P.S. doesn’t have the authority to bring them about. When I asked Reblin about the possibility of getting more creative, he pointed out that, whereas other countries’ postal systems are free to provide non-postal services, U.S.P.S.’s legal mandate doesn’t allow it to do much besides handle mail and packages. Some within the postal system have advocated for the government to change this, but, Reblin said, “My objective right now is to innovate within the law.” The U.S.P.S. also employs thousands of unionized workers who might not be excited about seeing their responsibilities expanded, presumably without a pay raise. And adding new services would, of course, require hiring or retraining employees, as well as reorganizing infrastructure to handle the new work and deal with the related security and privacy issues—significant tasks for an organization under serious financial pressure.

Fees for some of the more innovative new services could potentially bring in significant revenue to offset the costs.

Volkswagen has reached a settlement in principle with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California regulators, California attorney general’s office and consumers over a plan to fix or buy back nearly half a million vehicles that violated emissions standards.

The deal includes “substantial compensation” for owners of cars powered by two-liter “clean diesel” engines that were fitted with software to cheat emissions tests, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said in a hearing from a courtroom in San Francisco.

The accord could finally bring about a solution to a crisis that has bedeviled Volkswagen engineers, who have been unable to deliver a fix that was acceptable to the EPA.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller, who was appointed to pursue a settlement, had reached an agreement with all the major parties on a fix for vehicles and a plan to pay vehicle owners.

Volkswagen will also be required to invest funds to “promote green automotive” initiatives, the judge said.

The agreement helps Volkswagen avoid a trial over the emissions violations and economic losses to consumers, which Breyer had threatened to schedule if VW did not meet Thursday’s deadline to reach an agreement.

Attorneys for the U.S. government, state regulators and consumers worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week since a March 24 hearing to reach a deal, the judge said.

To be sure, the agreement is far from the end for Volkswagen’s emissions scandal. For starters, the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Volkswagen’s intentional evasion of emissions standards, which was first exposed by the EPA and California Air Resources Board in September.

The company is also facing several investigations in Germany, its headquarters, where it has much larger sales.

Barry Eichengreen writes:  Most obviously, Brexit would damage Britain’s export competitiveness. To be sure, ties with the EU would not be severed immediately, and the UK government would have a couple of years to negotiate a trade agreement with the European Single Market, which accounts for nearly half of British exports. The authorities could cut a bilateral deal like Switzerland’s, which guarantees access to the Single Market for specific industries and sectors. Or they could follow Norway’s example and access the Single Market through membership in the European Free Trade Association.

But Britain needs the EU market more than the EU needs Britain’s, so the bargaining would be asymmetric. And EU officials would most likely drive a hard bargain indeed, in order to deter other countries from contemplating exits of their own. The UK would have to accept EU product standards and regulations lock, stock and barrel, with no say in their design – and would be in a far weaker position when negotiating market-access agreements with non-EU partners like China.

In addition, Brexit would undermine London’s position as Europe’s financial center. It is quite extraordinary that the principal center for euro-denominated financial transactions is outside the eurozone. This attests to the strength of EU regulations prohibiting discrimination within the Single Market. But in a post-Brexit world, Frankfurt and Paris would no longer be prevented from imposing measures that favored their banks and exchanges over London’s.

The City is also an example of a sector that relies heavily on foreign labor. Upwards of 15% of workers in banking, finance, and insurance were born abroad. Attracting and retaining this foreign talent will become harder after Brexit, when EU workers moving to Britain will no longer be able to take their pension rights with them, and the other conveniences of a single labor market are lost.

Brexit could have more mundane, but highly noticeable, effects on Britain. Anyone who has spent time in the UK knows that the single greatest gain in the quality of life over the last generation has been in the caliber of the food. One shudders to imagine the culinary landscape of a UK abandoned by its French and Italian chefs.

Somewhat more weightily, a Britain that is just another middle power would be less able to project military and diplomatic influence globally than it currently is, working in concert with the EU. Although the UK would remain a member of NATO, we have yet to see how functional the Alliance will be in the era after US hegemony.

While the EU has yet to develop a coherent foreign and security policy, the ongoing refugee crisis makes clear that it will have to move in that direction. Indeed, this is the single most ironic aspect of the Brexit debate. After all, British public opinion first began to turn in favor of EU membership after the failed Suez invasion of 1956, which taught the country that, bereft of empire, it could no longer execute an effective foreign policy on its own.

All of which leads one to ask: What can Brexit’s proponents possibly be thinking? The answer is that they are not – thinking, that is. The Brexit campaign is tapping into the same primordial sentiments as Donald Trump is in the US. Most Brexit supporters are angry, disaffected voters who feel left behind. Exposure to international trade and finance, which is what EU membership entails, may have benefited the UK as a whole, but it has not worked to every individual’s advantage.

So the disadvantaged are lashing out – against trade, against immigration, and against the failure of conventional politicians to address their woes. Fundamentally, a vote for Brexit is a vote against Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and the political mainstream generally.

The real problem, obviously, is not the EU; it is the failure of the British political class to provide meaningful help to the casualties of globalization. Within the last month, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigned in protest over the government’s proposed cuts to welfare benefits. And on April 1, the minimum wage was raised. Maybe the voices of the angry and disaffected are finally being heard. If so, the Brexit debate will not have been pointless after all.

Matt Stannard writes:

A former top Federal Reserve policy adviser, and the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have stunned the banking world by calling for public banks and the breakup of big banks.

Andrew Levin is surely one of the most (formerly) high-ranking monetary policy advisors to call for publicly-owned banks, in this case calling for the Fed’s 12 regional outposts to be made government entities rather than privately-owned banks.At the beginning of this week, he called “for the Fed’s 12 regional outposts to be made government entities, rather than owned, as they have been since their inception more than a century ago, by the banks they regulate.”

And Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari used to be the “bailout czar” in Washington, “charged with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the financial crisis,” according to Jordan Weissmann, senior business and economics correspondent for Slate. In other words, Kashkari helped design TARP and other programs to save the big banks he now wants to break up.

Consciousness of banking as a public utility seems to underlie not only the two gentlemen’s policy ideas, but the media as well. The Reuters reporters who wrote on Levin’s call for public regional fed banks pointed out in their piece that “the U.S. central bank is the world’s only major central bank that is not fully public.”And actually, Kashkari’s call for “turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail” is an offhanded call for banking in the public interest.

And beyond just calling for publicly-owned regional banks, it’s pretty significant that Andrew Levin released his recommendations through Fed Up–a grassroots organization dedicated to radical changes in the Federal Reserve. High-ranking officials, and even consultants, hooking up with real economic justice groups seems to be the spirit of the times.

Both Kashkari and Levin are rebutting Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen’s stock arguments that “regulators already have the tools they need,” and, of course, Yellen is nowhere near the concept that banks ought to be publicly owned–even some banks, even really important ones. Levin has a history of harping on Yellen, telling her last September not to raise interest rates.

As Weissmann concludes: “We now have a former politician with establishment credentials who has ascended to a somewhat influential position within the Federal Reserve basically running a campaign to chop banks down to size—or at least make them dull, safe, and certainly less profitable.”

Kashkari is soliciting public opinion, by the way.

James Surowiecki writes:  From the crumbling bridges of California to the overflowing sewage drains of Houston and the rusting railroad tracks in the Northeast Corridor, decaying infrastructure is all around us, and the consequences are so familiar that we barely notice them—like urban traffic congestion, slow-moving trains, and flights that are often disrupted, thanks to an outdated air-traffic-control system. The costs are significant, once you reckon wasted time, lost productivity, poor public-health outcomes, and increased carbon emissions.

Infrastructure was once at the heart of American public policy. Today, we spend significantly less, as a share of G.D.P., on infrastructure than we did fifty years ago—less, even, than fifteen years ago. The U.S. makes no net investment in public infrastructure. Yet polls show that infrastructure spending is popular with a majority of voters across the income spectrum. Historically, it enjoyed bipartisan support from politicians, too. If it’s so popular, why doesn’t it happen?

One clear reason is politics. While both parties remain rhetorically committed to infrastructure spending, in practice Republicans have been less willing to support it, especially when it goes toward things like public transit. This is partly because of the nature of the Republican base: public transit is hardly a priority for suburban and rural voters in the South and in much of the West. But ideology has played a key role as well.

Over the years, the process of getting infrastructure projects approved has become riddled with what political scientists call “veto points.” There are more environmental regulations and more requirements for community input. There are often multiple governing bodies for new projects, each of which has to give its approval. Many of these veto points were put in place for good reason. But they make it harder to undertake big projects. In 2010, Chris Christie was able to cancel a new tunnel under the Hudson River more or less single-handed, even though more than a billion dollars had already been spent on it.

Even more egregious than the lack of new investment is our failure to maintain existing infrastructure. You have to spend more on maintenance as infrastructure ages, but we’ve been spending slightly less than we once did. The results are easy to see. In 2013, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that there’s an eighty-six-billion-dollar backlog in deferred maintenance on the nation’s rail and bus lines. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives America’s over-all infrastructure a grade of D-plus, has said that we would need to spend $3.6 trillion by 2020 to bring it up to snuff.

Again, there are political reasons that maintenance gets scanted. It’s handled mainly by state and local communities, which, because many of them can’t run fiscal deficits, operate under budgetary pressures. Term limits mean that a politician who cuts maintenance spending may not be around when things go wrong. There’s also what Erie calls the “edifice complex”: what politician doesn’t like opening something new and having a nice press op at the ribbon-cutting? But no one ever writes articles saying, “Region’s highways are still about as good as they were last year.”

Only when things get really bad willt infrastructure issues get public attention. This is the heart of our problem: infrastructure policy has become a matter of lurching from crisis to crisis, solving problems after the fact rather than preventing them from happening.

Congress tapped the Central Bank for monies this year, but that deal was a one off.  Infrastructure is usually financed by loans in the form of government bonds which are repaid by tolls, and other measures.  Jobs are created.  Structures made whole again.  Obama had a chance to do this in 2008 and did not.  Hard to know whether the next President will take up the important task.