New Orleans was lost for want of an adequate system of levees and floodwalls. Lawrence Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, tells us that 75% of America's public schools have structural deficiencies. The nation's ports, inland waterways, drinking water and wastewater systems are also badly in need of repair.
Ignoring these problems imperils public safety, diminishes our economic competitiveness, is penny-wise and pound-foolish, and results in tremendous missed opportunities to create new jobs on a vast scale.
Competitors are leaving us behind when it comes to infrastructure investment. China is building a network of 42 high-speed rail lines, while the U.S. has yet to build its first. Other nations are well ahead of us in the deployment of broadband service and green energy technology. We spend scandalous (and costly) amounts of time sitting in traffic jams or enduring the endless horrors of airline travel. Low-cost, high-speed Internet access, increasingly common in many parts of Asia and Europe, is little more than a science-fiction fantasy in many parts of the United States.
In Pennsylvania alone there were more than 5,600 bridges in severe need of repair. So the governor of the state more than tripled the amount in the capital budget, from $200 million a year to $700 million a year and got a special appropriation from the Legislature to do $200 million a year in extra infrastructure repair for the next four years.
The result? A lot of bridges were repaired. The bad news was that by the end of the sixth year of repairing bridges, in 2008, the number of deficient or structurally obsolete bridges had gone from 5,600 to more than 6,000. How could this be? The reason was that Pennsylvania had and still has huge numbers of bridges that are more than 75 years old, while the recommended lifespan for a bridge is 40 years. So in the time it took to replace or fix any two bridges, three more would bump onto the list of those in critical need of repair. That's what happens when, for the 30 years since Reagan took the White House, a country puts off infrastructure repair so as to keep funneling trillions of tax dollars into Wall Street schemes and tax breaks for multimillionaires.
It's easy, especially in tough economic times, to push aside infrastructure initiatives, including basic maintenance and repair, in favor of issues that seem more pressing or more appealing to the ruling class. But this misses the point that infrastructure spending that is thoughtful and wise is a crucial investment in the nation's future, as well as a world-class source of high-value jobs.
The great danger right now is that America will, in its ignorance, continue to turn away from its screaming infrastructure needs and simply let the deterioration continue. With infrastructure costs so high (the needs are enormous but so is the expense) and with Republican and "ConservaDem" eyes in Washington increasingly focused on deficit reduction, the absolutely essential modernizing of the American infrastructure may well not take place. That would be worse than foolish. It would be tragic especially for the young men whose need for gainful employment is so acute.
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