PUBLIC WORKS….California is on the verge of cancelling hundreds of public works projects because it can’t sell the revenue anticipation bonds needed to continue financing them:
Road, levee, school and housing construction projects throughout California are on the verge of being halted or delayed, as state officials prepare to shut off their financing in the most drastic fallout yet from California’s cash crisis.
Officials plan to meet today to freeze financing on these projects and about 2,000 others, including park improvements, environmental restoration and repairs to state prisons.
….Lockyer told legislators last week that halting public-works projects would have a ripple effect through California’s economy, costing private companies $12.5 billion and eliminating 200,000 jobs.
Let me just say up front that California’s problems are largely of our own making. If the rest of the country has zero sympathy for us, I don’t really blame them.
Still, this is a national problem, not just a local one. And if infrastructure spending is good stimulus, but the problem is that it takes a long time to get it up and running, then surely, at a minimum, you wouldn’t want to lose a single dollar of infrastructure spending that’s already in progress. Especially when the immediate problem has been caused by the freezing of the credit markets more than by California’s fiscal recklessness. TARP to the rescue?
