Washington, D.C. -- The White House today announced a plan that would pay for rebuilding the nation's highway infrastructure by auctioning off advertising and naming rights on federal highways. The proposal would break the current impasse with Congress on the Senate's $318 billion dollar transportation bill, which the White House has threatened to veto.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the plan would generate an estimated $42 billion dollars by splitting the nation's highways into 545,000 ten mile long segments and then selling the naming and advertising rights for each segment in a public auction similar to the one the federal government uses to sell parts of the spectrum for television and radio.
Vice President Dick Cheney explained how it would work. "Say a company like Halliburton--I can use that name because I won't be in the loop on bidder selection--purchases a ten mile segment. They would have the right to put signs up that say `Welcome to Halliburton Highway`. Then the next ten miles might be Boeing, and so on. Our proposal is based on an advertising density of one sign every ten feet on each side of the highway."
The proposal emerged from the administration's newly reorganized scientific advisory boards. The members of those boards--now mainly ex-CEO's from the oil and chemical industries--had grown increasingly uneasy with the direction of the nation's science policy.
One member, who declined to be identified, said that the boards felt strongly that President's science policies were leaving too much money on the table. "From a revenue standpoint, unused outdoor advertising space is just like any other part of the spectrum," he said. "We needed to see a better return on our capital."
Gregory Mankiw, Bush's Council of Economic Advisors' Chairman and noted Harvard economist, noted that while some parts of the project, like manufacturing and advertising design, would undoubtedly be outsourced to foreign companies, "this plan would create millions of jobs in areas we believe reflect the core competencies of the American worker."
Labor department spokesman Ed Crook-Bunch confirmed that the initiative could create as many as 2.2 million jobs for sign painters, sign assemblers, and post-hole diggers, mainly in states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, New Mexico and Iowa.
A spokesperson for the Kerry campaign conceded that the president's plan was "his most credible budget proposal to date."
In what was characterized as an unrelated move, the Re-Elect Bush campaign announced its intent to raise another $170 million to buy highway road signs in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan Wisconsin, Oregon, New Mexico and Iowa.