President Barack Obama

In his weekly Saturday radio and Internet broadcast, President-elect Barack Obama pledged the most significant new investment in America’s infrastructure, including bridges and roads, since President Eisenhower built the modern Interstate highway system during the 1950. Obama also proposed other forms of infrastructure spending,, involving schools, housing and energy projects that will create large numbers of new jobs. Barack Obama’s ideas hearken back to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, who utilized government deficit spending to build new infrastructure as a means of reducing unemployment in the wake of the Great Depression.

Barack Obama announced his ideas the day after a jobs report was issued by the government, indicating that in November a record half million Americans lost their jobs. With the U.S. economy clearly in free-fall, the President-elect sought to inject hopeful news about the country’s future at a time of fear about further financial meltdowns.

Among the initiatives proposed by Barack Obama are the modernizing and upgrading of the nation’s dilapidated schools. “We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms,” Obama indicated in his broadcast.