There are many impediments to making progress on the new infrastructure investments that America desperately needs: the difficulty of securing financing (whether through new energy taxes, private-public partnerships, or tax-credit bonds); national and regional political dysfunction; and the inability to prioritize projects. To that list, add NIMBY ("Not in My Backyard"), local opposition to a proposal for new development...

WASHINGTON, DC -- 10:00 am -- Vice President Joe Biden was raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania and has lived for decades in Wilmington, Delaware -- both working middle class communities that have been under siege from both domestic and international economic forces.

This morning at the Center for American Progress, Biden is going to host a discussion on the factors undermining America's middle claass with a number of scholars and public intellectuals. I'm here now at the meeting which is co-sponsored with the Economic Policy Institute...

A lot of people who normally don't take much notice of railroads were startled over the weekend when Warren Buffett, "the sage of Omaha," announced that he spending $26 billion to buy that last 77 percent of Burlington Northern Santa Fe shares he doesn't already own. Buffett described his investment as a big bet on the U.S. economy generally, and on BNSF, the nation's second largest railroad, in particular...

This is a joint post by Jeffrey Lewis, Flynt Leverett, and Hillary Mann Leverett. This post is cross-posted at Flynt and Hillary’s blog, “Race for Iran”:http://www.raceforiran.com/.

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Tirone has a story today revealing that Iran has dramatically expanded operations at its Gchine uranium mine. Tirone worked closely with Jeffrey Lewis at the New America Foundation, as well as other nuclear experts, to analyze satellite photographs of the Gchine mine...

Now that the second round of elections has been canceled and Hamid Karzai officially declared the winner of Afghanistan fraud-riddled ballot, it's time to assess how the AfPak Channel's experts did when they informally predicted the results of the presidential election the day before the August 20 polling in a parlor game we dubbed "The AfPak Crystal Ball."

After the fraud audit reduced Karzai's share of the vote by some one third of his ballots, the incumbent president was left with 49.7 percent, according to official results from the Independent Election Commission. Challenger Abdullah Abdullah wound up with 30.6 percent, and Ramazan Bashardost came in third place with 10.5 percent of the August 20 ballot. And according to the United States Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, one third of registered voters turned out to cast their ballots...

The U.S. High Speed Rail Association's (HSRA) recent conference, High Speed Rail 2009, brought together policymakers, academics, and rail experts from around the world to outline a comprehensive plan for high-speed rail (HSR) in the United States. Good timing: as the Obama Administration prepares to roll out $8 billion in stimulus spending and an additional $5 billion, five-year annual appropriation for HSR, participants discussed how best to allocate the funds and how much more money is needed.

The HSRA's headline proposal: a 17,000-mile, coast-to-coast network with trains running at top speeds of 220 mph, built out over the next 20 years. Such a plan would cost $600 billion, the group estimates--$30 billion per year for 20 years...

One day after the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the U.S. had returned to GDP growth, the Obama Administration released new numbers about the job-creation effects of the Recovery Act. The federal stimulus program has saved or created just over 640,000 jobs through a combination of aid to state and local governments, infrastructure spending, and federal loans and grants to private businesses. (640,239 jobs to be exact, Joe Biden said this morning.)...

By the looks of the September personal income data released this morning, we went back to the consumer slump in September. Cash for clunkers has officially clunked.

The decline in personal consumption expenditures was led by the decline in consumption of durables goods in the wake of Cash for Clunkers. At an annual rate, consumption of durable goods dropped by 47.2 billion, or 7% (see above). The overall decline in personal income expenditures showed a .5% decline...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry is going to give a major speech on Cuba on Friday, the 6th of November, at Boston University.

Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) -- who has been doing much of the heavy lifting on the Freedom to Travel (to Cuba) bill is also going to be at this important conference.

What has been interesting to watch in Senator Kerry's speeches this past year is a tendency to define challenges more clearly than the White House -- to articulate the costs of inaction or poor focus -- and to assimilate different policy alternatives with a candid discussion of opportunities and costs...

Increasing numbers of national security leaders of the likes of Brent Scowcroft and George Shultz have said that the US embargo of Cuba makes no sense and harms American interests.

Republican Congressman Jeff Flake -- the hunky Arizona Congressman who recently spent five days alone on a remote Pacific island -- has reminded Americans that it is COMMUNIST governments that are supposed to get a kick out of restricting the movements of its people -- not DEMOCRATIC governments. Congressman Bill Delahunt has been leading in the House along with Byron Dorgan in the US Senate in calling for an end to all travel restrictions on Americans...