In an incisive New York Times op-ed, Jared Diamond pointed out that the rate of consumption in the United States will inevitably decline. But, more importantly, he noted that living standards will not suffer a similar fate. Indeed, Western Europe’s rate of consumption is considerably lower than that of the United States, while nearly all measures of quality of life – those monikers of the truly middle class – such as life expectancy, health, infant mortality, financial stability after retirement, access to medical care, post-retirement benefits, vacation, public school quality, and support for the arts – are in fact higher.

This is all to suggest that the economic stimulus package signed into law last month was at best woefully insufficient and at worst purposefully misguided. An alternative stimulus measure – proposed as an amendment to the first package, kicked around as a concept at least since last August, and endorsed by Senators Clinton and Obama – highlights the continued myopia associated with equations of consumer spending and economic stability.

As an economic stimulus, ambitious, yet calculated, federal infrastructure projects stand starkly opposed to inducements to consumer spending. Such projects require foresight and forbearance on the part of politicians and constituents, alike. They demand consideration of long-term regional and national goals that range from transportation to sewage to drinking water. They compel consensus on issues as popularly amorphous as climate change and as strangely divisive as freight transport. Such projects at once transcend political opportunism and at the same time are subject to the worst vagaries of influence peddling. These projects ask the question: where should we be in forty years?

Federal spending on big, significant infrastructure projects in order to stimulate the economy would be an admission that the creation of quality jobs, not the perpetuation of a spending habit, is what must, what will, cure the economy. Certainly, one worries that the federal government often spends unwisely. While this may be true, spending public money on public projects that benefit all or most or even many Americans – even unwisely – seems greatly preferable to abandoning our public health to an inexorable cycle of spending and debt.

The comparison – or opposition – of consumer spending and federally financed infrastructure spending might seem forced or arbitrary. Instead, why not shore up SCHIP or NCLB or any number of federal acronyms that have been hollowed out or mandated without sufficient funding? After all, it is these programs – not infrastructure projects – that most obviously exist to provide those struggling at the bottom of the economic pool with the entitlements that permit them a “quality life”. Still further, federal spending on infrastructure projects is likely to fail the well-accepted three-T test for an effective economic stimulus (targeted, timely, and temporary).

Yet, unlike recommitment to programs (rightly) designed to account for failings of the competitive market, a commitment to federal infrastructure spending would telegraph a comprehensive vision for economic development in a United States increasingly reliant upon its metropolitan areas. In a way that individual entitlement programs cannot do, garnering public support for an overhaul of the nation’s “modally siloed” and “rigidly stovepiped” transportation policy, for its aging sewage systems, for its cracking bridges, for its port entries and its canals and its broadband connections, would require the engagement of the American public in a long-term strategy for prosperity that would create jobs, improve economic efficiency, and nod approvingly at the simultaneous globalization and urbanization that currently define the United States’ economy. No doubt many Americans will struggle less or, no less justly, will enjoy themselves more, if only for a short time, when their rebate checks arrive. Fine. We deserve this, and much, much more.