By Matt Dellinger
It was only minutes after President Barack Obama delivered his jobs speech to a joint session of Congress last Thursday night that House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair John Mica (R-Fla) was dismissing outright one of the President's main proposals. "I'm strongly opposed to any type of a new federal infrastructure bank," Mica told Todd Zwillich after the speech. "We've already had experience with some of these federal grant programs that requires Washington bureaucrats, Washington red tape, Washington approvals and then bowing and scraping to Washington."
There are many kinds of potential infrastructure banks, of course, and indeed some lawmakers - including Mica's Democratic predecessor, James Oberstar - imagined a bank as the grant-making group of technocrats Mica abhors. Others, however, have suggested that a federal infrastructure bank should act ... well, something like a bank: It should loan money independently of politics with revenue generation in mind.
Read the entire article at Transportation Nation.
