It's the infrastructure, stupid (or: Republicans kill jobs, again)

I hardly ever read Republican columnists, but this bit by Douthat caught my eye:

While the Bush administration overspent, it wasn’t spending and deficits that turned the country against conservative domestic policy between 2004 and 2008. It was the fact that the Republican majority seemed to have no answers to Middle America’s economic struggles, and no appetite for the structural reforms required to keep the United States competitive.

Put that in the context of new Republican leaders saying no to infrastructure, and you get yourself a nice replay of idiot Republicans once again unable to lead. They say jobs are the most important thing, but they think they will magically appear without actually doing anything to create them. There is no structural reform more important than infrastructure (the cost of which is really cheap right now).

And people like Douthat keep voting for Republicans anyway.

How many bridges will collapse before we hire some people to fix them?