1. Economic Stimulus plan - Use the stimulus dollars he has proposed to build a MagLev train that goes 250 miles per hour (if not 350) either along the Eastern Seaboard or between New York and Chicago. These don't need to be locals, but express lines that will, as much as they can, replace airlines and lessen traffic. Airline and bus companies, then, should get good stock options so that they retain a decent equity share if they have to terminate routes or liquidate assets. And the more lines we can build, the better. This should be a nationwide, gonig-to-the-moon project. Personally, I would love to see every mile of interstate highway torn up and high-speed rail - with freight capacity - installed in its place.
Engineers will be needed, and fresh ideas of every sort. There should be included in this an excellent scholarship fund that will send kids to college if they commit to contributing to this project. This would be a great way to increase our national interest in science and hopefully will increase the quality of science and math education.
These trains all run on electricity, and an overhaul of the nation's power grid should be undertaken. This includes not only the building en masse of wind turbines in the midwest and solar farms in the southwest, but the capacity to get that power to high-use areas, and the infrastructure to use that power to charge up electric autos.
2. Auto Bailout - Let them fail, whatever that will mean. I know it is hard for the workers, but right now, a new car company would have nearly no shot at making a serious step into selling cars without billions in capital. The way our auto industry is set up, there is no room for an "auto Google" (although Tesla motors may prove me wrong). If the big three are forced to reduce their size or collapse, the resulting vacuum will provide the opportunity, even if we have to wait until better economic times, for an innovative company to arise. Of course, right now, no one is buying new cars, so the companies need to shut down and decrease output. Letting them "fail" is the only solution our broken market can support.
Rather than provide a "bailout" for the auto factories, offer to buy out some of their factories, which will give them some cash and take them down to a size at which they can better survive. Offer to re-sell the factories to companies, like Tesla Motors (although Tesla has its own hurdles to climb before they are ready to enter into that scale of production) who have electric cars ready to produce. Alternatively, we could simply offer these companies the right to use the factories and buy in slowly as their profits come in. This option should first go to American companies like Tesla, but if it comes down to it, there are better foreign electric-car makers who we should try to recruit (Britain's Lightning Car Company, which uses an innovative battery technology and has a better drivetrain mechanism than the Tesla, comes to mind. Allegedly, the battery can charge at least 80% in ten minutes, making mid-trip refuels possible). Bringing them in means that they will invest foreign capital here, employ American workers here, and will their cars will be cheaper if they are built here.
What this will create is a culture where we have five or six auto companies, instead of three. Letting these companies get "too big to fail" is just poor risk management, the 'ole "putting all your eggs in one basket" mentality. Not to mention, it creates the managing vs. the working class. It brings us one step closer to the situation that, in Marx's prediction, leads to revolution.
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