By Larry Summers
BOSTON GLOBE / HUFFINGTON POST: Are you proud of New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport? It’s a question I ask nearly every audience I speak to these days. JFK, after all, is the largest entry point for foreign visitors arriving in what sees itself as the greatest city on earth.
To a person, I’ve never heard anyone answer, “Yes.” Vice President Joe Biden took it one step further in a speech earlier this year, likening the airport down the road, New York’s LaGuardia, to being in “some third-world country.”
Yet the unemployment rate for construction workers in the United States is in the double digits. And the government can borrow — in the currency we print — at long-term rates of less than 3 percent. If now is not the moment to rebuild these airports, when will that moment ever come?… (more)
If JFK and LaGuardia need to be rebuilt, NYC and the state of NY has the capacity to do so. Apparently NY residents don’t consider it a priority.
Perhaps, as Larry Summers says, it is due to the high cost of construction that results in extra billions being spent with no construction to show for it. Post WW2 infrastructure was built quickly and efficiently. People could see the progress.
Yet despite huge advances in construction methods construction times get longer. One only needs to see the delays over the Keystone Pipeline to get a flavor of the delay problem.