The $46 billion in spending on transportation contained in the 2009 stimulus bill was little more than a drop in the bucket compared to the decline in state and local spending. In its 2013 Report Card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure a score of D+. They further noted that fully repairing bridges alone would require $20 billion per year; repairing the full range of the country's infrastructure by 2020 would require $3.6 trillion.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted last month, "the $3.6 trillion in investment across 16 categories of infrastructure the ASCE estimates is needed by 2020 pales in comparison to the sums squandered on military adventures abroad and financial bailouts at home." The amount represents about three-and-a-half years of the current quantitative easing program of the US Federal Reserve, in which $85 billion in assets are purchased each month to prop up the banks.
In contrast to earlier in the 20th century, when the globally dominant position of American capitalism enabled a massive expansion of the nation's infrastructure, any serious public works program, or even just the repair of the total number of crumbling roads and bridges, is viewed as politically unfeasible. In fact, the "solutions" posed by the Obama administration to the infrastructure crisis are fully in line with the demands of the financial elite. The president's infrastructure plan announced shortly after this year's State of the Union address included calls for partnering local and state governments with "businesses and private capital," in addition to pledges to cut "red tape."
In essence, the plan would entail the further privatization of the state's transportation systems, the looting of public resources, along with the deregulation of infrastructure projects and the reduction of serious oversight. Thus, infrastructure spending would be subject by an even greater degree to the whims of the financial aristocracy, and the likelihood of transportation disasters would increase, not lessen.
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