AMERICA’S CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE—OUR BRIDGES ACROSS THE COUNTRY

There is simply no question that the steady neglect and the crying need for repair and improvement of bridges, levees and other vital pieces of the nation's infrastructure, and the resolute stinginess of a federal government that is much better at finding money to repair the Middle East than the middle west, makes disasters more likely to occur and more extreme in their consequences. Bridges will continue to fall, however, just as aging levies will continue to crumble, until the federal government gets serious about investing in the updating, improvement and replacement of a decaying infrastructure.

The American Society of Civil Engineers argues that, "With each passing day, aging and overburdened infrastructure threatens the economy and quality of life in every state, city and town in the nation." Conditions have grown so bad that the ASCE estimates it would cost $1.6 trillion over a five-year period just to bring the nation's infrastructure up to "good" condition. There are many costs that come when our leaders divert $2 billion and more every ten days to occupy a distant land. The first of these is human. Wars cost lives in a war zone, but they also dry up the funding that could save lives on the home front. By drawing resources away from vital social and economic development projects at home -- and maintaining a safe and functional infrastructure is essential to progress on both fronts -- an obsessive focus on war-making abroad leaves a trail of death, destruction and decay in the U.S.

All of this is not the whole story however. Poor road conditions cost motorists here 54 billion a year in repairs. Americans spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic. Just to keep the roads barely minimal in quality costs about $94 billion dollars  and even that is not enough. Again the same pictures emerge that we are in danger of being a second class nation without the future investment in our transportation systems. That is not even considering other infrastructures like rail, schools, solid waste, transit, security dams, aviation, and the national power grid. This being a presidential year it would certainly behoove the candidates to devote much more time to these subjects and how they would solve them.