Formal talks between both houses in Congress will not begin until the Senate passes its $827 billion version of the plan; the House already passed a bill that costs about $819 billion.

The deal came after five days of partisan stalemate, and followed news that the country lost nearly 600,000 jobs in January. Senators initially valued the compromise at $780 billion – after spending most of the day debating a $930 billion plan. Bipartisan opposition in the Senate, however, ultimately forced Democrats – and, President Barack Obama – to concede some spending initiatives and continue to put in place additional tax cuts. A measure to encourage auto and home sales, among other things, pushed the final total of the bill to almost $830 billion.

Some $108 billion in spending from President Obama’s plan, including funding for projects that likely would impact the economy immediately, was lost in the compromise.

On the cutting room floor:
- $40 billion in aid to states, money that could have prevented layoffs, cuts in services or tax increases.
- $20 billion for construction and repair of schools and university facilities.

Even when the Senate passes the stimulus sometime this week, it will take time to go into effect. President Obama cannot sign the bill until the House and Senate versions are reconciled, which both houses could take until March to come to terms on.

‘No Stimulus’

Sen. John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, has asked his supporters to sign a petition to buttress his opposition to the economic stimulus package pushed by the President and congressional Democrats. The petition states, “I cannot and do not support the package on the table from the Democrats and the Obama Administration.”

At nostimulus.com, Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing political advocacy group, has started a petition against the stimulus bill. Both the Web site of the group and its petition site are currently unavailable due to an overwhelming response. “Congress should not enact an expensive spending bill under the pretense of stimulus or recovery. We cannot spend our way to prosperity, and such an expansion of the federal government will put a crushing burden on taxpayers in the long-term,” the petition says.

Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr interviews advisors of both campaigns on how a President McCain or a President Obama would address four major infrastructure issues: roads versus rail; the fraying electrical grid; poor internet service; and whether or not the federal government should invest heavily in infrastructure as part of an economic stimulus package.

Whoever moves into the Oval Office come January will have to work with Congress on a new federal transportation bill. The new president will have to strike a balance between roads and rail when allocating those hundreds of billions of federal dollars. In the first segment of a four part Blueprint America radio series, a report on Barack Obama and John McCain’s sharply different positions on what kind of transportation the country needs.

[Transcript]

The Obama camp says that both pieces of the transportation pie need to grow – but the emphasis is on rail. Federico Pena is former Secretary of Transportation – and Energy – and a spokesperson for the Obama campaign. Speaking from his office in Denver, he said a President Obama would break with recent history and push for new federal investment in mass-transit and high-speed rail.

“Years ago, even before we had a very high price of oil, there were those who opposed transit throughout the country because they argued for example that out here in the West people would not get out of their car and get in transit systems and ride light-rail or even heavy-rail. Well, those opponents were wrong.”

The McCain camp acknowledges that high gas prices have led people to use mass transit in record numbers. But the Republicans are skeptical that federal money should be spent on rail – specifically, whether Amtrak’s inTER-city lines make sense in most of the country.

“Passenger rail is not going to be the primary vehicle.”

That’s Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain’s senior economic advisor. He says the Arizona Senator would pursue a transportation policy that would keep the car at its center.

“We have to change the way we drive and not drive on gasoline, but drive on alternatives, whether they be hybrids … next generation of automobiles are likely to be.”

The McCain plan calls for tax incentives for private companies – to encourage research and development on electric cars and clean technology.

But neither candidate has made transportation policy a priority.

“One of the reasons that infrastructure might not be popular among the candidates now is because we expect our transportation systems to be there.”

Robert Paaswell is distinguished professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. He believes that as the current financial crisis rolls on, the new president will realize that investment in transportation can actually lift the economy.

“Transportation creates economic activity and it is that investment in economic activity that would boom.”

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are talking about a stimulus bill that would spend heavily on infrastructure – including transportation. Former cabinet member Federico Pena says Obama supports the idea. Douglas Holtz-Eakin says McCain would look at it line-by-line to eliminate waste.

Americans take the electrical supply for granted. But the Grid – the system that transmits electricity to homes and offices – is aging and prone to serious glitches. Engineers say that across the country blackouts are increasing at an alarming rate. The next president will have to address the Grid – and the rest of the country’s crumbling infrastructure. In the second segment of a four part Blueprint America radio series, a report on how Barack Obama and John McCain say they will keep the lights on.

[Transcript]

Evidence of just how rickety the country’s electrical grid has become turned up on the afternoon of August 14, 2003. A small glitch in the grid in Ohio cascaded around the northeast, building in strength as it went, until finally it became a massive blackout that affected eight states and parts of Canada. Roger Anderson is a Columbia University scholar and consultant to electrical utilities. He says the Great Blackout of 2003 demonstrated what happens when the grid, which was built in the twentieth century, confronts twenty-first century problems.

“You’re helpless unless you have something that thinks faster than people do, in order to stop something that travels at almost the speed of light.”

Anderson says it’s even worse: the fundamental technologies that underlie the grid actually date back to the nineteenth century. Which means the risk of blackouts isn’t the electrical supply’s only problem. For example, he says, if half of the power that flows through the grid goes nowhere, it’s just wasted.

“If you could get it to 100 percent efficient, you’d have double capacity for the present, electricity grid. And we desperately need to move to an electric economy, to get off an oil and gas economy.”

In other words, Anderson says, the grid as it exists now could never manage to charge the millions of electrical cars slated to hit the road in just a few years. Both John McCain and Barack Obama say they support what Anderson and other engineers call a “Smart Grid” – one that uses high technology to move electricity like the internet moves information. But the candidates disagree on how the country should get there.

Frederico Pena, the former Secretary of Energy and a policy advisor to the Obama campaign, says the federal government has to take the lead.

“We have a series of national laboratories around the United States which are under the Department of Energy’s jurisdiction. Why not task all those terrific scientists, who years ago during the Cold War built nuclear weapons… encourage them to use that human capital to study these kinds of new technologies and the electrical grid system?”

The McCain campaign’s position is to prompt electrical utilities to do that research themselves, as they have traditionally. Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the Republican nominee’s senior economic advisor.

“We need to have a dramatically different electricity sector, so they must see a reason to put a smart grid in place, and we must give them the ability to recover the cost of those R and D enterprises. So when the regulators permit them to recover costs, and incentives are in place for them to change their business model, I think we can see them step up and meet the needs of the country.”

Historically, U.S. electrical utilities have spent less than foreign firms on research and development. Holtz-Eakin says a President McCain would prompt them to spend more by offering tax credits. Both campaigns say that while the problem has received little attention, it’s too risky to wait for another major blackout before trying to solve it.

America’s status as an Internet innovator is under threat. International studies have argued that Americans pay more than Europeans and Asians for significantly worse internet service. The Internet is another aspect of the country’s infrastructure that is getting some attention from the presidential candidates.

In the third segment of a four part Blueprint America radio series, a report on where John McCain and Barack Obama stand on bringing the country’s Internet service up to speed.

[Transcript]

The birthplace of the internet is doing pretty badly online by international standards. Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. He says the United States ranks behind Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Iceland, and a score of other countries.

“What we have now, first of all, is in a very big country, a whole lot of slow connections. And we still have a lot of the country that’s underserved or not served at all by broadband. And I think it basically comes down to the fact that we never had a clear national policy of conversation about how we’d roll out broadband in this country.”

Both John McCain and Barack Obama agree. Federico Pena is a former secretary of Transportation and Energy, and a spokesperson for the Obama campaign.

“It’s embarrassing how far America is behind the world.”

Pena says expanding internet access by delivering broadband service to millions of Americans in rural communities and poor inner-city neighborhoods will be a top priority of an Obama administration. The private sector has ignored those markets, Pena says, so government needs to step in and get them online. The McCain campaign agrees. Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the Arizona senator’s senior economic advisor.

“If private entities are not going to deliver wireless internet or broadband to an area, municipal governments should be allowed to.”

But that’s where the agreement ends. The campaigns differ sharply on government’s role in regulating that service. The sticking point is what Americans can and can’t do with their internet connections. Let’s say you want to use a service called Skype, which lets you make phone calls online. Siva Vaidhyanathan says most internet providers, whether they’re phone or cable companies, have an interest in making sure that you don’t.

“Both of them have a very strong incentive to degrade he service of Skype for instance to make sure that I get frustrated with it and rush to their service.”

Vaidhyanathan says, right now, there’s no law against internet providers doing that, which means consumers have fewer choices. Douglas Holtz-Eakin says a President McCain would keep things as they are. Federico Pena says an Obama administration would push for a law that would ensure that Americans can use their broadband connections however they’d like.

The collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis in 2007 sparked a debate on how best to rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure. Some experts now estimate that the country needs to invest over $1.6 trillion to fix everything that’s in need of repair. Now, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are debating whether spending to patch up the infrastructure might stimulate the economy. But, where do the presidential candidates stand on that idea? In the last segment of a four part Blueprint America radio series, a report on how the country may be able to reinforce its economy and infrastructure at the same time.

[Transcript]

John McCain and Barack Obama agree that fixing the country’s infrastructure will be a priority. Yet neither one’s said much about it on the campaign trail. That’s probably because the country’s fighting two wars, and an economic slowdown.

“The discussion of infrastructure has been limited by those events.”

That’s Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s senior economic adviser. He says infrastructure projects are too often examples of pork-barrel spending – gifts from lawmakers to their constituents. Take the case of roads:

“We have to change the way we do business. Far too often we see our highway monies allocated on the basis of their political benefit and not their economic benefit.”

The Obama campaign emphasizes the power of infrastructure spending to create jobs. The centerpiece of the Democratic nominee’s proposal is the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank that will invest sixty billion dollars over ten years. Robert Paaswell is distinguished professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. He says the idea is to get the states to cooperate with the federal government – by putting up a pot of money.

“Several billion dollars from which projects over $75 million dollars, worthy projects that hopefully are vetted can come to the table and find subsidies, or the feds can issue bonds, or the feds can loan money to the States to issue bonds.”

But as the economy continues to tank, Congress is not waiting for a new president. The $150 billion stimulus package currently calls for a hefty chunk of change to go toward upgrading roads, bridges and other infrastructure. Federico Pena is former Secretary of Transportation and Energy, and a spokesperson for the Obama campaign. He says the Illinois senator supports the idea.

“The Senator has made it clear that in the stimulus proposal he recommended that almost half of it would be directed to some form of infrastructure investment.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin says McCain’s not opposed to the proposal in principal. But a President McCain would examine individual spending proposals, and oppose the ones that he decided won’t do much for the economy.