The country has been hit hard by lost jobs in manufacturing and construction. As government and political leaders are scrambling for ways to stimulate the economy in the current downturn, infrastructure improvements would seem to be a natural component of any effective recovery plan.
“In terms of stimulating the economy, there is nothing better than a job,” said Senator Dodd.
The need for investment on a large scale — and for the long term — is undeniable. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in a study that should have gotten much more attention when it was released in 2005, it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over a five-year period to bring the U.S. infrastructure into reasonably decent shape.
Will we wait until another New Orleans-style disaster occurs, or another heavily traveled bridge plunges into a river?
As things stand now, the American infrastructure is incapable of meeting the competitive demands of the globalized 21st-century economy. Senator Hagel noted that ports are overwhelmed by the ever-expanding volume of international trade. Rail lines are overloaded. Highways are clogged.
“The basic infrastructure of a country will determine that country’s future,” he said, “and we are far behind.”
We appear to have forgotten the lessons of history. Time and again an economic boom has followed periods of sustained infrastructure improvement. It’s impossible to calculate all of the benefits from (to mention just a few) the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and helped make New York America’s premier city; the rural electrification program and other capital improvements of the New Deal; the interstate highway program of the Eisenhower administration.
The tremendous costs and vast reach of today’s infrastructure requirements means that the federal government has to take a leadership role. It’s inevitable. The only question is when.
The financier Felix Rohatyn, who served as ambassador to France during the Clinton administration, and former Senator Warren Rudman, a Republican, have been sounding the alarm for a number of years now, urging the government to get over its unwillingness to invest adequately in public transportation systems, water projects, schools, dams, the electric grid, and so on.
I remember Mr. Rohatyn telling me, “A modern economy needs a modern platform, and that’s the infrastructure.”
The current concern over the economy should be taken by the government as a signal to finally move ahead on this critically important issue.
An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."
The greatest casualty of the Iraq war is Iraq = ordinary people whose lives have been taken in their millions since 1990, or blighted by wounds, disease, stress, poverty, malnutrition, fear, bitterness, and always the fear of depleted uranium taking yet more of them, stillborn babies, chidren with leukemia, way into the future for ever and irreversible, just like much of the destructionof Iraq's cvultural heritage is irreversible.
I don't mean to disparage your valid points about suffering for the poor in the US economy, trauma for servicemen, etc but please realise that the rest of the world sees such a headline as you chose to be very nationalistic and rather narcissistic.
by
Keith Mothersson (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 58 comments)
on Friday, February 1, 2008 at 9:19:45 AM
My piece may have come off sounding as though I was iterating according to some array of prioritized horrors. I did not intend that, regardless how it might have seemed.
I was in the Army from June 1964 to mid-June 1967. I got out before 1968 Tet, when things descended from one level to the lowest of Dante’s Inferno. Jim Head’s bunk and foot locker were a few removed from mine. In the squad, we didn’t know better. We always considered it was just an idiosyncratic quirk, how Jim raced through bottles of Aqua-Velva and Listerine. Only years later did I realize it was how Jim got from one day to the next. Others were zoned out on weed, on coke, on whatever they could get their hands on, which was just about anything, because anything and everything was available.
For 31 years I lived in San Jose. The main library, downtown, is a 3-story structure, with the first level below the slope of the street. Every night, you can find them, the 40- and 50- and 60-somethings huddled down there, against the walls, trying to escape the cold. You’ll also find them along the brush-shielded banks of the Guadalupe River that runs through the town’s suburbs to the urban core. And what you’ll find is that anywhere from a third to one-half are Vietnam vets; nowhere to go, minds shattered.
None of us has the right today to think Iraq vets will be different, that they’re made of different, sterner stuff. Everyone who has been “there” knows, as no one who has not can even imagine in his or her darkest nightmares what hells and terrors reside like malignant worms in the mind. Innocents who once skipped on nimble legs fall mutilated, prayerfully dead, to know suffering no more. But the dead, even they do not die. They live in the soldier’s mind. They come out in the middle of the day or they wake him at night, seeking their revenge.
So, if I came across as somehow dismissing or dismissive of what the Iraqi populace has realized since we liberated them, please understand I most assuredly had no such intention.
Thank you for your very thoughtful response nonetheless.
— Ed Tubbs
by
Ed Tubbs (178 articles, 1 quicklinks, 24 diaries, 58 comments)
on Friday, February 1, 2008 at 10:04:36 AM
2 comments
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