Gas-powered automobiles? The walking dead. Only a government would be stupid enough to invest in 100+ year old, incredibly inefficient and incredibly polluting technology. The idea of people driving around (by themselves mostly) in thousands-of-pounds vehicles that use most of the energy they consume to create heat is absurd and it needs to end, not be prolonged.
The solution is light rail. Expensive? The oil companies say it is so it must be so. If all the money that has gone into roads, cars, car insurance, car repair, etc. would have instead gone into light rail in the first place it would have cost us less. Instead of us all being 2 or 3 car families we could easily have had 1 or maybe even 0 car families. And we wouldn't have spent so much of our time stuck in traffic, contributing to pollution. We would have been encouraged to live near rail in denser housing, instead of on what was once farm land, range land or wilderness. Instead of a world built for cars we could have a world built for people.
Light rail would be an investment in the future that would have value. Light rail leads to a more efficient economy, raising everyone's standard of living. And today's light rail, where it exists, would have been 10x as effective if governments and people would not have had to invest in both light rail and roads. If we'd have stuck with light rail (and not let GM dismantle it) we would have been so much better off. Oh yeah, and GM, the company that destroyed public transit back in the 1920's deserves to be saved? They do not.
Home renovations? This is their great solution, more consumption? The consumption-based economic model (which can only end one way: badly) is part of what got us into this mess in the first place. This is nothing more than a small gift to the rich; only the well-off can even think of such expenses in today's economy. Gee, how about increasing funding for education, or lowering the cost of starting a small business, or investing in green technologies, or investing in broad-band (to encourage more people to work at home).
The amount talked about, something like 30 billion dollars, could have been used to jump start a wind-power industry in Canada. Factories could have been built. People could have been trained. Wind farms could have been built. And all of it would have been an investment in the future providing something of value - green energy. The wind is free and clean oh idiot leaders, oil is expensive and dirty.
But no, our government don't want to invest in our future. It isn't that they are too stupid to know better, it is just that they are too corrupt to care.
