COMMENT: Obama must lead on infrastructure to move economy

Jul 31, 2011 | 07:00 PM | John Ambrosia

Tags  Comment, Intrastructure Spending,

When it comes to backing the notion of government intervention in the marketplace, business leaders in the metals industry have just three words for Washington: infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

Throughout 2011, and especially this summer, calls have come from metals players for infrastructure investment to help lift the U.S. economy out of its continuing doldrums. What they want is a mixture of public investment, aggressive deregulation, generous tax policy and job creation.

That viewpoint hasn’t changed much since January 2009, when President Obama took office amid an optimistic clamor that he would usher in a series of programs that would revive demand for steel, aluminum and other metals as part of his overall plans for economic recovery—a sort of New Deal for the 21st Century.

What the nation needed, many economists and manufacturing sector analysts said at the time, was an aggressive plan to put people back to work rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, advanced manufacturing—just the sort of projects that require tons of metal.....