mr. freeman, please. >> thank you come on mr. chairman, members of the committee. s jeff freeman the debut director of the minnesota public facilities authority. i'm here to talk about the program and our experience with the american recovery and reinvestment act funds. the minnesota public facilities authority for multiagency infrastructure financing authority that manages the clean water state revolving fund, drinking water state revolving fund, a estate infrastructure bank for transportation projects and several other infrastructure financing programs. since the clean water state revolving fund began in 1989, minnesota has received 500 of the 7 million in federal capitalization grant, added 150 million in state matching funds and leverage those funds with their own aaa rated revenue bonds to manage 2.4 billion clean water projects throughout the state. these low interest loans have seen cities and the taxpayers over 500 or 2 million in interest charges. the us, financing us help local governments rehab and replace aging wastewater plants, upgrade systems to meet

mr. freeman and mr. rubin tomorrow for the "wall street journal" and "l.a. times" that passed away last year. he would do three or four per week and he's indicated them we paid $350 per review but a lot of bases just do it for free. you that your payment you get to keep the book. there is no way now to support yourself as a critic as a popular critic. >> we should talk about the ftc and giving back books of first i want to hear from katharine you have a lot of different places it. >> it was on the job training corps five 1/2 years i m incredibly will read secure novelist which has been helpful. [laughter] but because i get assignments snout i read the first novel in 1986 but it was the way for me to really understand fiction and from the inside out with structure, pacing, and having to write reduce from even concise anonymous ones that will report that fifth the reviews do it is understanding about how novels are made. now as somebody writes a first novel this had a grim side effect because i knew all too well what happens when you publish your first novel.

mr. freeman and other colleagues because i was a corporate lawyer. i might have been a shill for shame and things changed and i've always been a blogger for someone. i went from aol to publishers weekly. i went from publishers weekly to pbs, where i am now blogging and twisting the site so the perceptions have changed but what i haven't seen discussed enough and i will bring my own thing to the table, nbc group is that not everything that is labeled a book review is a book review. let's talk about that because that's one of the problems about getting readers to know whether it is encouraging you to buy the book or not. there's other things to bring up. so, speed, what is a review versus something that is a summary or just a quick report? >> is an interesting question. a lot of book reviews are just reports, and i've never even thought about making that distinction it's not a book review largest thought it was a bad book review. [laughter] >> those were the ones i turned it. [laughter] >> yeah, do we as a presumption the audience wants book reviews or

. >> jeff freeman, we don't fund the waste water treatment system like we do transportation, just as a consumer of the system, what do you think? >> mr. chairman, i think it sounds like a very innovative idea. and actually that -- that's -- tieing it back to what i know more about, with the clean water revolving fundprogram, is it's an innovative and sort of a different approach to how financing is being done for municipal waste water treatment, setting up these revolving funds and using, then, the ability to leverage money. you know, and in that way i think your proposal is similar and i'm all for it. >> thank you. you're an economist, i take it. >> yep. yes. >> what do you think? >> i think that the government doesn't have any money, and as you mentioned, each time the government spend money it needs to take it somewhere in the economy. and it makes it very hard to actually measure the return, the true return on investment on the dollars invested by the government. 15 cents, you know, may not seem like a lot to you, to me. this 15 cents is on top of the dramatic increase in gasoline prices that we've seen certainly in the last ten