"What happened on Sunday night isn’t about New Orleans. It speaks more to the pressing challenge of ensuring our infrastructure is capable of enabling America to be competitive in a global economy. Infrastructure facilitates the smooth, efficient and profitable maintenance of commerce. It helps ensure public safety, and both human and environmental health.
It’s all around us, from our electrical grid to telecommunications to water and sewage systems. Our roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, dams, ports, trains and mass transportation systems also work together to ensure that in this vast land of more than 300 million people we can produce more and have a better quality of life. The United States once led the way in the development or advancement of all the elements of modern infrastructure. Not since ancient Rome had a civilization have such an impact on the way the world works.
Infrastructure projects have also long been a major catalyst for jobs, particularly for immigrant workers and the middle class. The massive projects were once a route into the middle class for countless millions in the 19th and 20th centuries and made the American Dream possible. And yes, they were largely funded by the government with tax dollars.
That time is unfortunately long gone, unless a new model for funding projects is adopted in this country. It costs more to build a bridge, or tunnel or dam here in the U.S. that anywhere else in the Western world thanks in no small part to onerous environmental regulations, redundant authorities and rising labor costs – also impacted by government overreach. You can all but forget about building a power plant.
As a result, the state of the US national infrastructure is today falling behind that of other nations. Just take a look at Europe’s light rail system, the Middle East’s airports, and Asia’s bridges. Despite the fact that we continue to invest tax dollars by the billion, it is clear the old funding model isn’t working. Spend ten minutes at Newark or JFK airports. That’s real cause for embarrassment.
In 2011, the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. 15th in the category of infrastructure, behind the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, the UK, and Canada. It is estimated that our nation’s critical needs for maintaining and upgrading our various systems and arteries will cost more than $2.2 trillion, but we’ve seen a 50% decline in U.S. infrastructure investment as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product since 1960. While the Obama Administration promised both jobs and infrastructure improvements with its colossal, trillion-dollar stimulus program, only roughly $70 billion went to critical projects.
Even Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute lamented last year that Obama’s allocation of stimulus funds did little to help solve the problem because too much money was spent elsewhere.
The old, taxpayer financing model clearly needs to give way to far more aggressive private sector investment model."
Read more: What the Superdome Blackout Says About American Competitiveness - Forbes
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