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Yep. The stimulus bill was a golden opportunity to do something about this but we dropped the ball.
The damage wrought by Hurricane Isaac, coming on the seventh anniversary of the flooding that decimated New Orleans and stunned a nation, serves as a not-so-subtle reminder of how much infrastructure matters to our safety and our economy.
This time the levees held, thanks in part to the $14.5 billion a shamed federal government was forced to invest following the 2005 disaster. But for decades, America has scrimped on taking care of the public furniture, endangering people and weakening the economy as bridges rust, roads crumble, dams weaken, and water mains leak. The sudden collapse of an Interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, killing 13, and the cracks that shut down the Sherman Minton Bridge connecting Indiana and Kentucky last year (it reopened in February) are warning signs of widespread, but hidden, dangers lurking all around us.
Even greater threats can be found among the decrepit corporate-owned infrastructure, including high-pressure oil and natural-gas pipelines that can explode without warning, electric power poles long past their replacement dates, and a telecommunications system that is far less reliable today than it was two decades ago—despite customers paying more than a half-trillion dollars for upgrades.
America’s infrastructure gets a grade of “D” from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which recommends that we spend $2.2 trillion on repairs and maintenance...
Under the banner of deregulation, the monopolies that supply electricity, water, gasoline, natural gas, and Internet access have been hollowing out the privately owned infrastructure on which modern life and economic activity depend. Instead of putting more into maintenance, they have slashed budgets. At the same time, they earn phenomenal profits: up to 55 percent on their assets, eight times the average for all corporations.
Corporate monopolies that own railroad bridges, hydroelectric dams, and high-pressure pipelines have skimped on taking care of this infrastructure, putting lives and property across America at unnecessary risk from blackouts, collisions, and explosions, even the threat of entire towns being washed away by bursting dams.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newswee...-disaster.html
Yep. The stimulus bill was a golden opportunity to do something about this but we dropped the ball.
indeed
guess it's entirely too much to expect infrastructure monopolies (energy concerns, states and localities too) to fulfill their corporate charters or their obligation to the public -- the American civilization, really -- that relies on their services.
One construction related thing that the stimulus money really helped for was military bases though....I've done more work at military bases with stimulus money than any private sector work combined over the past 2 years.
^^^Poorly worded^^^^
Military bases expanded thanks to stimulus money.
That's better.
nationalization of critical infrastructure and fuel is an answer
completely untenable politically. maybe if you were our enlightened despot it could happen.
We saw about 500 bills that met that same criteria come out of congress this year. Why shouldn't boutons be able to spew it freely on a message board?
he just did. my reply was not an attempt to stop him.
The article clearly wanted to play the evil corporation game and hit on some blue team talking points like deregulation, but that's pretty disingenuous considering that most of our nation's infrastructure is owned by the taxpayers in one form or another.
when for-profit corps can't justify stuff (they'd rather pocket profits than spend money doing their damn jobs), then it's time for for-citizen govt to nationalize, just like was done with fire and police many decades ago.
I don't doubt it. Misfeasance is private and public.
Have you got any figures on the public/private breakdown?
Depends what specific infrastructure you're talking about. Things like roads, bridges, waterways, levees, dams, airports, parks are pretty much going to be 100% taxpayer owned.
When you get into utilities there's a definite mix of public and private but I could only guess at what that percentage split would be. Even within the private utilities you'd need to look at what the regulatory enviornment is to get an accurate picture as to whether or not that utility is truly free from taxpayer control.
We can't actually employ the least bit of far sighted thinking in this political society we live in. Obama's administration was too fixated on shovel ready projects (those words to this day piss me off) to actually put into work a program that would have done a of a long term good and left him with a damn good legacy regardless of reelection.
Agreed. These days you can't find a politician who can look past the next election.
There always raising funds and schmoozing since winning an election costs so much, resulting in them being indebted to the donors requests. A totally corrupt system.
Yes, because nationalization has been a smash success.... just look at the Post Office, Amtrak, and Social Security!
Privatization and deregulation, disasters for airlines, and for citizens who pay more and get less.
http://www.marke ch.com/story/ame...ion-2016-08-26Gross domestic investment totaled about $3.6 trillion in the second quarter of 2016, about 20% of gross domestic product. That may seem a large sum, but it’s the lowest share of GDP, except during recessions, since 1947.
And, unfortunately, even that weak number grossly exaggerates the actual contribution of this investment in creating new productive capacity for the economy. Why is the figure exaggerated? Because these data are reported on a gross basis, without subtracting the depreciation of capital assets such as equipment, buildings, software and the like.
After you subtract the capital that’s used up, net investment totaled only about $750 billion in the second quarter, or 4% of GDP, about half of the average over the post-war period. In fact, net investment has been running at the lowest rates since the Great Depression of the 1930s, suggesting that U.S. investment itself is in a depression.
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