Job Creation Driving Highway Bills in Congress

Do the highway bills really create more jobs? The answer from a lot of economists is not really.
by | March 5, 2012









Support for the five-year, $260 billion House bill has since fallen apart because conservatives think it spends too much money, and because Democrats and some Republicans balk at policy changes they say would undermine mass-transit funding, weaken environmental protections and penalize union workers.

Urgency is growing because the government's spending authority for highway and transit programs expires at the end of this month and the trust fund that finances them is expected to go broke sometime next winter. Boehner is struggling to find some mix of policy and spending that can win the votes needed for passage.





But that analysis "assumes that if this bill doesn't pass, all funding ceases, which really isn't a fair assumption," said Joshua Schanks, president of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a transportation think tank.




The question of job creation is relatively unimportant when compared to the other significant economic benefits associated with maintaining and improving the nation's aging transportation system, like enabling people to get to work and businesses to speedily move goods, economists and transportation experts said.

Schanks pointed to the construction of the federal interstate highway system, which began in 1956 and was completed 35 years later.

"How many jobs did we create by building the interstate system? Nobody knows. And who cares? We built the interstate system, that's what matters," he said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.


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