Now that President Obama has announced a new plan to spend $50 billion in public works projects — including, it seems, bridges — we offer as a reminder of how this works our editorial called “The Joseph Biden Bridge.” It’s about how the government plans to spend half a billion dollars to paint the rusting span across the East River that the vice president reckons has become a symbol of what America stands for. In actuality the Brooklyn Bridge has become a symbol of how labor unions, environmentalists, billionaire mayors, and left-wing vice presidents have conspired to spend your money like water and bill you for it later. Futureofcapitalism.com, the Web log of the former managing editor of the Sun, Ira Stoll, has been all over this story.

The president’s newest initiative, on which details are sketchy, follows consultations with what the New York Times, in its story on the demarche, calls “an influential group of three — Ed Rendell, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania; Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California; and Michael R. Bloomberg, the independent who is mayor of New York.” The trio founded, in 2008, a bi-partisan coalition called Building America’s future, which, according to its Web site, bills itself as a group of “elected officials dedicated to bringing about a new era of U.S. investment in infrastructure that enhances our nation’s prosperity and quality of life.”

We’re not against a certain amount of infrastructure spending, so long as the money for it is taken out of social programs and not out of new taxes or the war budget. But a vast government infrastructure project is not how we would approach the problem of our rusting bridges, subways, locks, and airport systems. Our first choice would be to sell them to private owners. When Mr. Stoll, in an interview for the first issue of The New York Sun, asked Mayor Bloomberg about this possibility in respect of the city’s plan for a subway line up Second Avenue, the mayor demanded to know what the Sun reporter was smoking? We answered that question in the first editorial in these columns. It’s the spirit in which we look forward to covering the infrastructure spending plans now being hatched by Mr. Obama.