Team Obama wants to invest heavily in national infrastructure. Green energy and repairing bridges are on the cards. I want to plead to the team, please do not ignore our IT infrastructure needs. This is NOT 1932, when most people worked in construction. Now large segments of the public work in the IT industry, or in other industries in IT capacities. Consider:
A. Almost half the people laid off last month were in the services sector, the majority presumably in the IT services sector. Don't we need them back at work?
B. There are more people with computer-related skills in this country than bridge-related. Should we not address that group?
My proposal is to invest some of that infrastructure investment into IT services which would be provided to everyone on a transaction fee basis. Consider what is lacking today:
- A healthcare IT infrastructure that eases the pain of claims submission, claims processing and payment. Some projections put the amount of waste in this system to be about 30% of the $2 trillion healthcare market. When you add in fraud, that could easily reach 40%. Imagine an investment of, say $50 Billion GENERATING savings of $800 Billion a year. Probably one of the more profitable investments ever, and generating thousands and thousands of jobs across providers, payers and processors as the country transitions to a national healthcare plan.
- A financial IT infrastructure that eases the pain of financial transfers, monitoring financial transactions (Credit Default Swaps, anyone?), and ensuring compliance. We all know the losses are in the tens of trillions of dollars. Imagine investing, say $50 Billion to ensure this never happens again?
- An intelligent energy grid that monitors, accounts and delivers energy countrywide. Losses in faulty transmission are accounted in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Imagine another investment of $50 Billion into an energy infrastructure that complements the green energy policies.
Certainly people smarter than I must create the budgets and the returns on investment. But on the face of it, it seems to me these investments will provide the taxpayer very high returns and address deepseated maladies in the country's infrastructure. What say you?