Daily Clips: December 1st, 2015

Hillary Clinton’s infrastructure plan, explained: In case you haven’t heard, Hillary Clinton put forward a bold infrastructure plan “that would generate $500 billion in additional infrastructure spending over the next five years.” She rightly called such an investment a “down payment” on our future.

Matthew Yglesias notes:

Infrastructure spending is in a sense a win-win for the economy, which both directly creates jobs and indirectly lays the foundation for further growth. But to maximize the growth-generating potential of infrastructure might require undermining some of its job-creating punch.

David Brooks talks to himself: It seems that each column Brooks wades deeper and deeper into…I honestly don’t know. This time, he has a conversation with a dead man about the Paris climate talks; namely, Alexander Hamilton. Brooks moans that any climate agreement will result in cheating which in turn “will create a cycle of resentment that will dissolve any sense of common purpose.”

His attitude on climate change might as well be, “We’re all fucked – let’s pack it up, boys.”

The two American economies: Peter Temin argues that the US has become a “dual economy.” By this he means “the disparity between the top thirty percent and the remainder has increased to the point” where both sets should be thought of independently. According to Temin, “the upper sector of the dual economy is the FTE sector, named for its main components: finance, technology and electronics. The lower sector of the American dual economy is the low-wage sector, and education is the way for people to go from the low-wage to the FTE sector.”

 Two-thirds of Americans want U.S. to join climate change pact: But hey, since when did the US government care what the people thought?