Infrastructure and jobs

According to Chief Economist Jack Wells at the U.S. Department of Transportation, whenever the economy hits a rough spot, politicians often say that we need to spend more on transportation infrastructure to create jobs. They often cite numbers like “47,500 jobs are created for every billion dollars spent on infrastructure.” The Federal Highway Administration has indeed done estimates of the number of jobs that are supported by spending on highway infrastructure, and the “47,500 jobs” number comes from one such study done in 1997. But a billion dollars doesn’t buy as much as it used to, in highways as in most things, and, because that billion dollars buys less steel, concrete, and employment-hours, recent updates of those studies have cut the number of jobs supported by a billion dollars in federal highway spending to about 34,800 jobs. Read more here. Mr. Wells' post has more than few critics. Check out this response from the Energy Collective. Your comment?