I suggest you read this interview in Slate:
http://www.slate.com/...
Michael Grunwald, a Time magazine correspondent, this week publishes The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, a gripping account of President Obama’s stimulus bill. Grunwald writes that the stimulus has transformed America—and American politics—in ways that we have failed to recognize.
It's just a completely new way to think about Obama's stimulus plan, the Change we can believe in agenda, and Barack Obama himself.
Here's one small sample:
The New Deal produced tangible, monumental physical achievements—dams, trails, works of art, buildings. The stimulus produced none of that. There were no new bridges—instead they repaved old ones. Why? Why didn’t the Obama administration look for physical structures to build and celebrate?
I wouldn’t say “none of that.” The stimulus is producing the world’s largest wind farm, a half dozen of the world’s largest solar arrays, and America’s first refineries for advanced biofuels. It’s creating a battery-manufacturing industry for electric vehicles almost entirely from scratch. It financed net-zero border stations and visitors centers, an eco-friendly new Coast Guard headquarters, a one-of-a-kind “advanced synchrotron light source.” It jump-started three long-awaited mega-projects in Manhattan alone—the Moynihan Station, the Second Avenue Subway, and the Long Island Railroad connection to the East Side—and it would have jump-started that multibillion-dollar rail tunnel to New Jersey as well if Governor Chris Christie hadn’t killed the project.
It didn’t build new dams, because we don’t need new dams, but it did finance the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history to restore salmon flows on the Elwha River. It even distributed $50 million to artists.
Well, just read the interview. It's long, but well worth it. It makes me want to get the book.
http://www.amazon.com/...