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Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the chief sponsor of the Senate bill, estimates it will preserve 1.8 million jobs that would be lost if authority to spend trust fund monies expires, and create another 1 million new jobs through a $1 billion loan-guarantee program. The loan program has been shown to generate as much $30 in private sector investment for every $1 in federal aid. To reach her job estimate, Boxer used that formula, plus Federal Highway Administration estimates that every $1 billion in highway spending creates about 35,000 jobs if it is matched by state and local aid. Nearly 3 million jobs "are hanging in the balance" as the Senate debates the bill, Boxer said. But that analysis "assumes that if this bill doesn't pass, all funding ceases, which really isn't a fair assumption," said Joshua Schanks, president of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a transportation think tank. It's unlikely that Congress would allow highway and transit aid to lapse even if lawmakers can't agree on a longer-term bill, he said. Rather, he said, they are likely to pass a short-term extension of current programs, as they have done eight times since the last long-term transportation plan expired in 2009. Also, jobs created by the loan-guarantee program may be a long time coming since the program is aimed at financing major projects, economists said. "In many cases this is not spending that occurs very rapidly," said Alan Viard, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Anything that involves construction has notoriously long lead times." The question of job creation is relatively unimportant when compared to the other significant economic benefits associated with maintaining and improving the nation's aging transportation system, like enabling people to get to work and businesses to speedily move goods, economists and transportation experts said. Schanks pointed to the construction of the federal interstate highway system, which began in 1956 and was completed 35 years later. "How many jobs did we create by building the interstate system? Nobody knows. And who cares? We built the interstate system, that's what matters," he said.
[Associated
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