Somewhere lost in the debate over President Obama’s proposed $825 billion economic stimulus plan is a call to improve the country’s vast but decaying infrastructure. I’m not talking about roads, bridges, and highways but rather servers, cables, and routers.

America owes its economic dominance in recent years not to how many cars or refrigerators its factories pump out (assuming of course, we still make things on American soil) but rather our ability to harness the power of the Internet to import and export digitized information. Think Google and Apple, not Ford and Maytag.

The economic crisis has presented Obama with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to link the future with the present. Create jobs for today, innovate for tommorow. We can have our cake and eat it too. That’s why spending billions of dollars to upgrade nation’s digital infrastructure makes every bit of sense as pouring concrete on Highway 62.

In a recent report, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation argues that directing stimulus money towards broadband technology will produce farther reaching results than mere road projects.

“It is this ability of high-speed broadband to create the conditions, the fertile soil, that generates entirely new upstream industries that is perhaps the most important component of the ‘network effect,’” the report says. “The resulting deployment of innovative services, applications, and content enhances communication, entertainment, health care, education, job search, and professional skills development, delivering substantial consumer benefits, increasing business productivity and spurring economic growth.”

The foundation estimates a $30 billion investment in IT infrastructure this year will produce about 949,000 jobs. Included in that figure are 212,000 jobs in health care information technology, which should be of particular interest to Minnesota given the presence of UnitedHealth, Medica, HealthPartners, and a litany of local start-ups specializing in health care IT like VisionShare and ProVation Medical.

I’m normally skeptical of economic impact reports…who really knows how these groups calculate their figures. But the rationale behind a digital stimulus is sound. We live in an information economy so it makes intuitive sense to upgrade our digital infrastructure. Minnesota is already doing that, with varying degrees of success (can everyone in Minneapolis get WiFi yet?)

But as the report notes, it will take a significant federal stimulus to make a real difference. Building new roads and bridges may be politically popular but if Obama is serious about building tomorrow’s economy, then we need to invest in today’s Internet infrastructure.

Last Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a $6 billion broadband plan that will provide grants to providers of high-speed Internet networks. The money is part of Obama’s stimulus package. That same day, Forbes published its annual list of most wired cities: Seattle is number one while Minneapolis rose to No. 7 from No. 11, beating out cities like New York and Portland, Oregon.

Coincidence? To quote from a popular movie set in Seattle: “It’s a sign!”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.