I agree with the sentiment that this makes more sense than paying for the Iraq war and for bailouts. But that's not saying much. I hope at the very least that it's largely used to repair existing bridges and so forth. Unfortunately in politics, it is much more glamorous to roll out new stuff than to keep the old stuff in good working order.
And it won't be some miracle tonic for the economy. We proved that during the 1930's and Japan proved it during the 1990's (are they still in a recession?).
Here's another way to look at it. The refrigerator analogy. Let's say it's hot one day and your a/c isn't quite keeping up. You open the door to your refrigerator because hey, it says it produces 500 BTU's of cooling, so your room should cool down, right? No, it will get warmer. You produced 500 BTU's of cooling, allright. But in order to do that, the motor/compressor had to produce 1000 BTU's of heating. And you can't get the cooling without the heating, it's impossible.
Likewise, a big grandiose make-work program from Washington may indeed produce say, 100k jobs. But those jobs have to be paid for with taxes. And those higher taxes (or borrowing, or inflation) will surely kill jobs elsewhere. Or result in some other form of economic misery. Really, if creating jobs and wealth and prosperity were possible by government fiat, then surely one of the communist countries would have have discovered the secret.
Truthfully, we should be auctioning off our roads to the highest bidder, to stay solvent and to ensure the roads remain well maintained. A privatized road system, or at least a privatized Interstate system, would eliminate traffic jams, encourage mass transit, and put the brakes on suburban sprawl, which is the real root cause of our oil addiction. Unfortunately we will probably expand our road network tremendously, thus setting off another wave of sprawl just like the original interstate highway program did.
