The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. There are currently different versions of the surface transportation bill moving through each chamber of Congress. The House [...]

House Republicans are honoring a deep tradition in American politics by trying to save their political skins and their majority through the passage of a highway bill. In past years these would be earmark-laden affairs designed to channel resources to particular districts and bolster the case for re-election. That’s not quite the case this year. [...]

Let’s briefly go through a few of the other proposals in last night’s State of the Union Address, none of which will come to pass this year if they include an act of Congress, but which offer some insights regardless: • The broader mortgage refi plan: HARP 2 is already operative, and Fannie and Freddie [...]

I mentioned Ireland’s woes in my last post. It reflects a consistent pattern: austerity coming out of an economic crisis, based on faulty ideas of an expansionary contraction, followed by a backslide into recession. In some cases, the debt load increases as a result, defeating the original purpose of the austerity. That hasn’t happened yet [...]

Back in 2008, after the Presidential election, I remember Rachel Maddow doing an interview with President-elect Obama and asking him about infrastructure needs, citing an American Society of Civil Engineering report giving the country a failing grade for infrastructure, with hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in projects needed for upgrades and maintenance. [...]

There are two big transportation-related bills awaiting completion in Congress. Yesterday Congress passed, and the President signed, the annual appropriations for the Department of Transportation, which included a zeroing out of funding for the Administration’s cherished high-speed rail project. The other two big measures are an FAA authorization bill, and a surface transportation bill. The [...]

One thing that Democrats and Republicans were able to get together on yesterday was to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government for an additional four weeks beyond today’s deadline, until December 16. The continuing resolution was attached to a “minibus” of three appropriations bills, for various federal departments, including Commerce, Justice, Transportation, Housing [...]

Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement said today on a conference call that the police action to evict protesters from Zuccotti Park will only amplify future efforts, starting on Thursday with a planned day of action that will occur at sites across the country. “We’re going to get in the streets by the tens [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 80,000 jobs in October, and the topline unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 9.0%. This is the seventh straight month that the unemployment rate has been between 9.0 and 9.2%, a period of stasis for the economy, a low-growth holding pattern. The private sector [...]

Republicans successfully filibustered the Rebuild American Jobs Act today, rejecting a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the bill by a count of 51-49. 60 votes were needed for passage. All 47 Republicans voted against cloture, and they were joined by two members of the Democratic caucus – Democrat Ben Nelson and the [...]

Today, the Senate will vote on a motion to proceed on the Rebuild American Jobs Act. This version of the jobs legislation proposed by President Obama in September basically takes the infrastructure pieces from the bill, including an up-front $50 billion investment and $10 billion in seed money for a national infrastructure bank. It’s all [...]