Posted by
Michael Heimlich on Saturday, June 27, 2009 2:29:31
I am partway through a History Channel documentary called The Crumbling of America:
http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=452430
This should be mandatory viewing for American resident. There is an impending disaster and it's not from an asteroid hurtling to Earth and it's not from burning fossil fuels. It's due to decades old roads, sewers and drinking water infrastructure that is disintegrating.
The Global Warming advocates claim that coastal regions will be underwater in 80 years due to a catastrophic rise in sea level.
There are many Americans who won't be that lucky - they may be underwater in 5 - 10 years due to catastrophic levee failure. There may be others killed by contaminated drinking water or collapsing roads and bridges.
What disgusts me even more than the infrastructure decay is that our government had a perfect opportunity to deal with it recently, but blew it.
Our government passed a "stimulus" bill with a price tag north of $800 billion dollars, but less than 10% was allocated to infrastructure projects.
The "Big Dig" project in Boston cost $18 billion. MA needs at least that much to deal with the existing, decaying infrastructure. Proportionately, this means that the country could use $900 billion in infrastructure spending.
Does that number look familiar? It was spent on ACORN and investigating pig odor instead of spending it on capital projects that would have employed construction workers during a real estate depression and that would have restored or even improved our infrastructure.
Now we will be faced with having to spend the money after a disaster hits, rather than preemptively, but make no mistake - it will have to be spent eventually, but it will cost more in dollars and it will cost more in lives lost.
This could have been the moment, this could have been the time, for REAL leadership in DC, for REAL bipartisanship and for REAL change to deal with a national emergency. Instead, we were given more of the same partisan favoritism and lavish, wasteful spending that is typical of corrupt politicians looking out for themselves instead of the voters.
This could have been a momentous undertaking comparable to Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system that would have solved an existing problem and significantly softened the recession's impact. Instead, we had wasteful pork barrel spending on a monumental scale.
What a disgrace.