Marathon Pundit: "Why can't we build big things anymore" and the Keystone XL pipeline

Utah Route 12

This used to be the country that built great things. Even President Obama knows that, as the Daily Caller tells us:

At a recent campaign event, President Obama said that the United States "became an economic superpower because we knew how to build things." He went on to list the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge as monuments to America's capacity for greatness.

Yet somewhere along the line, the ability to complete massive public works projects ended. "When did that happen?" the president asked.

It's impossible to pinpoint exactly when it happened, but we all know why it happened, and it has nothing to do with our capacity for innovation. The culprit is a labyrinth of increasingly complex and confusing federal regulations.

Obama and his fellow Democrats love to tout the legacy of their liberal icon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His New Deal actually built things, such as Utah State Highway 12, which I drove on last summer. It was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. But Obama's first and presumably last stimulus, for the reason given by the Daily Caller, doesn't want to build roads, it just wants repave them.

And it doesn't want to build oil pipelines either, even though I'm paying $3.50 a gallon for regular gasoline.

Canada is processing petroleum in Alberta--and it wants to transport it here on the Keystone XL pipeline.

From the the Caller:

The Keystone XL pipeline would create thousands of new construction and manufacturing jobs in the middle of the country, significantly reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and generate billions of dollars in new tax revenue. Environmental analyses show that it will be the safest pipeline ever constructed, a significant accomplishment in a country with over 160,000 miles of pipelines transporting oil products.