americorps and vista kids do great things in our neighborhoods. we have in fha and fannie mae and freddie mac, we have 300,000 foreclosured homes that belong to those three federal agencies, sitting there waiting for someone to buy them. it s not going to happen in this market. fix them up, spend money fixing them up, it will put a lot of construction workers to work and rent them to families and use the rental income to offset the cost of the money to fix them up. you know that part of the most successful part of the stimulus was, of course, cash for clunkers, but there was also a great rebate for buying energy efficiency appliances and weatherizing your homes, that was sold out. let s put it back into place right now, october 1st, it will create a lot of new activity and jobs and do good for the country, so there are a lot of good ideas out there, and if he spells it out and shows the price tag, people are going to look up and say you mean we could create those decent jobs for x ?
you ve been saying on the air for a long time, said we ve got to invest in our infrastructure for the long run, a ten-year program like almost every other developed nation in the world has done to really do big things and leave our infrastructure in great shape for future generations, but having said that, we can take infrastructure and do things that would put people to work in the next four months. if we passed the bill on october 1st, we could have people working when the march construction season starts on roads and bridges. we have 70,000 structurally deficient bridges in this country, the states and local governments don t have enough money to work on all them, half of them, or a quarter of them. we could do it and the president, all he has to do, is put in something that he liked during the transition when 50 governors met with him in philadelphia on december 1st, 2008, and that s lose it use it or lose it. meaning you give the states a certain time to have work underway. if t