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Back in 2008, after the Presidential election, I remember Rachel Maddow doing an interview with President-elect Obama and asking him about infrastructure needs, citing an American Society of Civil Engineering report giving the country a failing grade for infrastructure, with hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in projects needed for upgrades and maintenance. The stimulus package did not have the infrastructure dollars necessary to put a dent in that. And so, here we are, three years later, with all these infrastructure needs still extant, with borrowing costs so low that the Treasury could borrow at a real negative interest rate, and still… nothing.
Although they are out of sight and out of mind except when they spring a leak, water and sewer systems are more vital to civilized society than any other aspect of infrastructure.
Rapidly deteriorating roads and bridges may stifle America’s economy and turn transportation headaches into nightmares, but if the nation’s water and sewer systems begin to fail, life as we know it will too. Without an ample supply of water, people don’t drink, toilets don’t flush, factories don’t operate, offices shut down and fires go unchecked. When sewage systems fail, cities can’t function and epidemics break out [...]
And just like roads and bridges, the vast majority of the country’s water systems are in urgent need of repair and replacement. At a Senate hearing last month, it was estimated that, on average, 25 percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before reaching the faucet. The same committee was told it will take $335 billion to resurrect water systems and $300 billion to fix sewer systems.
This isn’t an optional investment. Without water infrastructure, chaos reigns. You can argue the same thing with important transportation arteries, particularly strategically important bridges. Cities would shut down, with major economic implications, without a functioning transportation system.
And yet these issues have been met in the Presidential campaign with silence. That’s true on Capitol Hill as well. The American Jobs Act included a national infrastructure bank, with $50 billion in up-front seed money for various projects. The Chamber of Commerce and organized labor support it. But it went nowhere. And with campaign season arriving 10 months early, I doubt you’ll hear about it again in 2012.
The only possibility that more attention will get paid to infrastructure needs would be in the event of a disaster in a major American city. And that’s too steep of a price to pay.
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The WH and the GOP Presidential Contenders are silent because they both want to force more SS and Medicare cuts down our throat they can’t do that if America finds the money to fix its infrastructure.
After SS and Medicare get cut more the Corporations will promise to fix our infrastructure for a small profit, that will grow much larger once they get control of the entire market from the government.
So, what are you doing to defeat Republicans running for Congress in 10 months?
Republicans have been on strike since 2009 and have been blocking any repair of infrastructure because they want to kill jobs and defeat Obama.
To conservatives, there is no number of people killed by failing bridges, no amount of economic decline from failing infrastructure, no defeat in a war due to lack of the infrastructure of steel, manufacturing, transport, that is too high for Republicans if it defeats Obama.
(WWI efforts were greatly hindered by the dysfunction railroad system and it was necessary to nationalize them so the government could fund rebuilding the railroads.)
I would not be surprised that if Obama is reelected, but Republicans can control Congress, they will drive the economy down by making sure the nation’s infrastructure becomes horribly broken and causing corporations to move to other nations just to have ports and other transport facilities.