Mark Muro / Oct 23 2009
For Release Friday, October 23, 2009
Citiwire.net
The truism, of course, is that Las Vegas is the great exception–a bizarre, completely unrepresentative aberration thankfully isolated in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
And there is plenty of truth to the perception, crystallized in the fantastical, now mostly frozen construction site of the Strip skyline.
And yet, as my group at the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution launches an initiative to deepen our research in the Mountain West, I find myself thinking less about the ways Las Vegas is strange and more about how it is representative, even emblematic of America’s current predicament.
After all, Las Vegas’ gargantuan problems and its necessary way forward mirror and take to an extreme those of our troubled nation as a whole. Read More »
Mark Muro and Jennifer Bradley / Apr 02 2009
For Release Sunday, April 5, 2009
Citiwire.net
How should a nation stimulate the economy when there’s no single U.S. economy, nor even 50 state economies, but instead a loosely linked network of 363 metropolitan economies, each composed of multiple, independent-minded towns and counties?
Well, for one thing it should invest in what matters to metros, and beyond that, it should provide to regions significant power and incentives to “put it all together” in a coherent way.
That’s the way to make the most of a stimulus push.
Which raises the $700 billion question: How did Congress and the Obama administration do this winter with the now-famous American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), at $787 billion the biggest and boldest response to a national economic downturn in U.S. history? Read More »
Mark Muro / Feb 19 2009
For Release Sunday, February 22, 2009
Citiwire.net
President Obama’s economic recovery package will succeed to the extent it juices the true engines of the American economy–U.S. metropolitan areas, home to two-thirds of our population, generators of three-quarters of our GDP.
That much is clear.
But now that Obama has traveled to Denver to sign the bill, doubts are in full flow about whether the needed juicing will actually occur.
Overwhelmingly, the smart set predicts the bill’s haphazard collection of separate funding items–for roads and transit, schools, safety net programs, and energy efficiency–will be frittered away in an uncoordinated spending spree. The prevailing “wisdom” is that state and local implementation of the $787 billion package will degenerate into a scrimmage of competing agendas among governors and legislatures, state capitals and city halls, and even between neighboring municipalities. Read More »