Snap Fact #279 - The Obama Recovery Act, Like the New Deal, Will Leave a Cherished National Legacy! Part 4 of 5

• • It included $27 billion to computerize health care.

  • Its Race to the Top was a landmark in education reform.

  • Its high-speed rail program was the most ambitious transportation initiative since Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 creation of America’s interstate highway system. It extended the reach of high-speed Internet to underserved communities, a modern twist on the New Deal’s rural electrification.

  • It modernized the New Deal-era unemployment insurance system.

  • And there is so much more.

America didn’t need a new Hoover Dam, although the bill did finance the largest dam-removal project ever. The Obama Stimulus will leave a more legacy more in tune with the twenty-first century: a down payment on a greener, more competitive economy with a healthier, better-educated, and better-connected workforce.

Nostalgic liberals often complain that the stimulus lacks iconic Hoover Dam and Skyline Drive type mega-projects. In fact, the Obama Recovery Act is creating its own icons: zero-energy border stations, state-of-the-art battery factories, some of the world’s largest wind farms and half a dozen of the largest solar farms on the planet. But its main legacy, like the New Deal’s, will be iconic change in the way Americans think and live. The stimulus was the biggest and most transformative energy bill in history. The Act poured an astonishing $90 billion into record expansions of every imaginable form of clean energy, from renewables to electric vehicles.