Congress' focus on jobs in highway bills

The lure of roads, bridges, buses and trains isn't enough anymore to drive an expensive transportation bill through Congress. So to round up votes, congressional leaders are pitching the bills as the hottest thing around these days: job generators.

But do they really create more jobs? Not really, is the answer from many economists. The bills would simply shift investment that was creating jobs elsewhere in the economy to transportation industries. That means different jobs, but not necessarily additional ones.

"Investments in transportation infrastructure, if well designed, should be viewed as investments in future productivity growth," said Alice Rivlin, a former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton. The dividends come over the long run.

"If they speed the delivery of goods and people, they will certainly do that," she said. "They will also create jobs, but not necessarily more jobs than the same money spent in other ways."

Indeed, the question of job creation is relatively unimportant when compared to other significant economic benefits of maintaining and improving the nation's aging transportation system, such as enabling people to get to work and businesses to speedily move goods, say economists and transportation experts.

But that hasn't diminished the jobs claims being made on Capitol Hill.

"This legislation would put 2 million middle-class Americans back to work right away," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday, as he fumed about nearly 100 amendments that have delayed action on the Senate's version of the transportation bill.

In the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made a transportation bill the election-year centerpiece of the GOP's jobs agenda last fall when he unveiled its broad outlines. To make sure nobody missed the point, the bill was dubbed the "American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2012."

"A transportation bill will be the biggest jobs bill Congress could ever pass, bigger than anything else they've done in the three and a half years I've been in this job," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said, praising the Senate bill.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chief sponsor of the Senate bill, estimates it will preserve 1.8 million existing jobs and create 1 million new ones. But that's predicated on an assumption that all government funding would cease if Congress fails to act, an outcome other experts consider unlikely.