A Blaze of Bright Blue: Infrastructure

Saturday, June 4, 2011

U.S. number one in failing infrastructure

American society of civil engineers

evaluates our infrastructure and we are NOT number 1

2009 Grades

Aviation D

Clean drinking water...not self-evident for ev...

Image via Wikipedia Bridges C

Dams D

Drinking Water D-

Energy D+

Hazardous Waste D

Inland Waterways D-

Levees D-

Public Parks and Recreation C-

Rail C-

Roads D-

Schools D

Solid Waste C+

Transit D

Wastewater D-

America's Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion
9% unemployment and a slow economy. Working on our infrastructure will help our economy now and in the future. We can leave something for our children besides crushing debt and crumbling streets. D- on drinking water? Come on, this is bad, if we can't provide clean and safe drinking water to our citizens then the U.S. is no better than some third world countries. Time for the republicans to answer to the public and fix our roads, bridges, schools and the rest of our fading infrastructure. When you spend 720 million dollars a day in Iraq for years [1.] there is little leftover for the U.S. infrastructure to improve. It will be years before we feel the full effect of Bush's ill conceived and fraudulently prosecuted war in Iraq. Now, we are left with crushing debt, and a crumbling infrastructure, and few resources to handle any of it. The worst part is over half of our elected officials don't think the government should do anything.

Fareed Zakaria wrote a great piece today, where he outlines some of the dangers prolonged unemployment poses. Fareed's take: how to fix america's job crisis. He concludes with this, emphasis mine:

Well, there are several things we could do to spur job creation. I wrote about them last week in TIME Magazine. But, briefly: (a) create a regulatory and tax climate that helps small businesses since they create most of the new jobs, (b) revive manufacturing by focusing on research, technical training and apprenticeship, (c) help growth industries like entertainment and tourism to expand and, perhaps most urgently, (d) rebuild America's dilapidated infrastructure and put millions of people in the construction and housing industries back to work.
The crucial point here is that if you care about America's economy, centrally including the deficit, you need to get people back to work - being productive, spending money and paying taxes. And we need to do this fast.