The Obama stimulus package should be spent on transformative investments, not bridges and roads. - By Eliot Spitzer - Slate Magazine

Here is where the New Deal analogies are instructive. The New Deal probably didn't pull us out of the Depression; World War II did that. What the New Deal did was redefine the social contract—perhaps just as important an outcome. The ultimate significance of the Obama package may be not its short-term demand-side impact but rather its capacity to transform our economy and, in turn, some of the fundamental underpinnings of our society. This introduces the second major problem: The "off the shelf" infrastructure projects that can be funded immediately and provide immediate demand-side stimulus are almost by definition not the transformative investments we really need. Paving roads, repairing bridges that need refurbishing, and accelerating existing projects are all good and necessary, but not transformative. These projects by and large are building or patching the same economy with the same flaws that got us where we are. Our concern should be that as we look for the next great infrastructure project to transform our economy, we might rebuild the Erie Canal and find ourselves a century behind technologically.