Of all the states in the country to talk about road repair, it is interesting that it was North Dakota that was featured in this story about crisis in road maintenance. I can only assume the Wall Street Journal reporter was in North Dakota to cover other stories, perhaps the oil industry, eh?
If so, the reporter was in Jamestown, ND, nowhere near the oil activity so someone must have gotten lost. More likely they flew into Fargo and drove a rental car out west and got sidetracked by the big buffalo.
Whatever.
It's too bad all of the 2009 $878 billion stimulus money didn't go toward highway and road maintenance around the country. Imagine all the jobs, and the flow of those dollars through the economy. The money would have paid workers, would have bought new machinery, and would have bought raw materials from suppliers in this country, not from overseas.
The dollars used to buy machinery would have gone to workers in the rust belt and stimulated that part of the economy. Certainly, the bill could have mandated that stimulus dollars be spent at heavy construction equipment factories actually physically situated in the US, regardless of ownership, foreign or domestic.
Those workers might have been able to keep up with their mortgages.
Whatever.
It's my myth that most of the stimulus money maintained overstaffed state government bureaucracies and agencies, and prolonged the inevitable (at some point the money would run out). But everyone has his or her own myth with regard to the stimulus. As JRR Tolkien has said, we all have our myths, and once we have them, they are unlikely to change.
Regardless, North Dakota is again on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Kewl.
