Christian Science Monitor

A consensus is emerging to include billions of dollars for transportation projects in an economic stimulus plan to be taken up shortly after the presidential election.

Infrastructure investments may well be the best short-term stimulus available to policymakers. Supporters tout the two-for-one benefits of fixing crumbling highways and bridges while pumping money and jobs into a sagging economy. And there's no outsourcing a road crew.

However, standing between your state highway department and all those federal infrastructure dollars is something far more dysfunctional than the local traffic… more

"There are times when you need to run up the deficit and this is one of them," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group in Washington that came up with the $1 trillion estimate. "But we ran them up when we did not need to, and we have no plan to stop running them up. We have become serial deficit spenders." LINK

Still another reality: Broad adherence to the Washington-driven international economic prescriptions of recent decades, under which the market and private sectors took over for a reduced state, is a thing of the past.

"This crisis has finished off the Washington consensus," the standard package of free-market reforms promoted by Washington and the Bretton Woods institutions to replace the state-run economies of developing countries, says Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College London and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation… more

"If [AQI members] were smart, they would say this requires kind of a strategic rethink and we need to be a more touchy-feely Al Qaeda in the future. I think there's been some very mild evidence that Al Qaeda in Iraq has done that, but not enough to really bring it back to the position where it was in 2006," says Peter Bergen, a prominent Al Qaeda expert and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy… more

Just ask St. Cloud, Fla. This central Florida community of 28,000 residents commissioned and now owns a truly citywide Wi-Fi network at no additional cost to residents. For more than a year, it has been the only town in the country able to offer 100 percent service availability, according to a study released earlier this year by the independent wireless testing company Novarum. The survey dubbed St. Cloud’s $3 million network the best metro Wi-Fi in North America – ahead of Mountain View, Calif., where locally grown… more

Malaise has made a comeback.

How else to describe the results of a recent Rockefeller Foundation/Time magazine poll in which 49 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds surveyed said that America was a better place to live in the 1990s and will continue to decline. Nine in 10 of all respondents agreed that just getting by is as hard as or harder than ever before.

At the root of such pessimism is the failure of the nation's social contract – the policies and institutions that support… more

One of the most talked-about books of the genre is “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” The authors, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, young editors at Atlantic Monthly, assert that while the GOP has learned to speak to the cultural concerns of working-class whites, it has failed to address their economic unease. They propose a mix of wage subsidies for the working poor, a bigger child tax credit, and steps toward a universal healthcare system rooted in the… more

Undersecretary Glassman does not shrink from placing radical Islam at the center of the US effort. But the new US focus, he says, is more about providing alternatives of thought and action than about trying to impose an American or Western vision of what is right. Speaking recently at the New America Foundation in Washington, he said, "Our role is to be a facilitator of choice – to allow young people to make their own choices, rather than imposing them." LINK

With continuous cross-border attacks from Pakistan fueling a resilient insurgency, Afghan President Hamid Karzai finally snapped. If Islamabad did not move more forcefully against Islamic militants in the country's tribal region, he declared recently, Afghan forces would enter Pakistan and do it themselves.

While the remark shocked Pakistani authorities and sparked a brief diplomatic row, it is not just President Karzai who is concerned about militancy in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Policymakers in London, New Delhi, and Washington are… more

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. . .At an April 2 round table hosted by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin suggested that reducing the federal budget "is not an end in itself," according to a summary of the event published by CRFB. Rather than focusing on red ink, a president should talk about all the important issues related to the budget, including the need to protect US security and help American families, he said.… more