INFRASTRUCTURE….Time to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure? Support for the idea is growing:
Public officials, engineers and policy experts have been warning for years that crumbling infrastructure is a ticking time bomb….A third of the nation’s major highways are in poor shape, according to the Department of Transportation. The list of unsafe dams is growing. Mass-transit systems, water-treatment plants, hazardous-waste sites and more are falling apart.
The civil engineers association gave the country a “D” on its 2005 infrastructure Report Card. It called for a $1.6 trillion five-year improvement program.
Now, sure, you’d pretty much expect a civil engineers association to back a program of civil engineering projects. Still, the time is right. The usual argument against infrastructure projects as fiscal stimulus is that they take too long: you have to identify projects and draw up plans first, and only then do you put people to work building stuff. By the time the projects get started, the recession is over.
But not this time. The recession we’re going into now promises to be deep and long, and a big slug of infrastructure improvements would not only be handy things to have, their timing is pretty good too. And politically it’s doable too since there are plenty of projects available for all 50 states.
McCain hasn’t bought into this because (I’d guess) he still doesn’t really appreciate the scope of our financial problems. Plus he probably associates infrastructure projects with earmarks, so he has a Pavlovian reaction against them. Obama has done a little better, but only a little. It would be smart, both politically and substantively, for him to at least start making more aggressive noises on a big, bold infrastructure plan.
