When you juxtapose this tremendous national need with the wholesale destruction of employment that has occurred over the past several months (and that is expected to continue for some time), you have to wonder why President Obama and Congressional leaders are not moving with extraordinary quickness to put together an infrastructure investment program that is both vast and visionary.

Instead, we have infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation’s overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs.

Among those who have expressed their concerns publicly is Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, a Democrat and persistent advocate of infrastructure investment. Just prior to President Obama’s inauguration, Mr. Rendell said of the stimulus package being considered by the House: “Anybody who thinks  if the president-elect thinks, or the team thinks  that this is the answer to America’s infrastructure needs is in a different universe.”

The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve.

The mantra (I can hear it now) will be that we can’t afford to spend any more money on the infrastructure, or on a big health care initiative, or any of the nation’s other crying needs. Suddenly fiscal discipline will be the order of the day and the people who are suffering now will suffer more, and the nation’s long-term prospects will be further damaged as its long-term needs continue to be neglected.

We no longer seem to learn much from history. Time and again an economic boom has followed a period of sustained infrastructure investment. Think of the building of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Think of the rural electrification program, the interstate highway system, the creation of the Internet.