...“What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”
And the spectacular rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which killed 13 people, was not enough to get us serious.
Not even the terrible economic downturn that has gripped the country — a downturn that could be eased by a truly big-time surge of infrastructure investment — has been enough to get the leaders of the country to do the right thing.
We’re rushing to bail out the banking industry for what? What kind of country will we have once the bankers are fat and happy again? The U.S. will still be a nation with a pathetic mid-20th-century infrastructure struggling to make it in a dynamic 21st-century world. It’s a blueprint for sustained national decline.
The reason to seize this particular moment to move with a laserlike focus on the infrastructure is because of the desperate need to stop the advancing rot, and because rebuilding the infrastructure is a phenomenal source of employment...
When you juxtapose this tremendous national need with the wholesale destruction of employment that has occurred over the past several months (and that is expected to continue for some time), you have to wonder why President Obama and Congressional leaders are not moving with extraordinary quickness to put together an infrastructure investment program that is both vast and visionary.
Instead, we have infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation’s overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs...
The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve.
The mantra (I can hear it now) will be that we can’t afford to spend any more money on the infrastructure, or on a big health care initiative, or any of the nation’s other crying needs. Suddenly fiscal discipline will be the order of the day and the people who are suffering now will suffer more, and the nation’s long-term prospects will be further damaged as its long-term needs continue to be neglected.
We no longer seem to learn much from history. Time and again an economic boom has followed a period of sustained infrastructure investment. Think of the building of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Think of the rural electrification program, the interstate highway system, the creation of the Internet.
We’re suffering now from both a failure of will and of imagination...
Among other things, Mr. Herbert, we are suffering from a $ystem that is designed to deliver everything and everyone into the hands of the robber barons.
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