Debating Infrastructure

The reality is inescapable and has been stupidly ignored for decades. The American infrastructure is crumbling before our very eyes and not just under the weight of hurricane wave and creaking earth either.

This past week of disasters has illustrated that America’s roads, bridges, and vital buildings are ill prepared for the strains of our modern world. Realizing we just came out of a debt debate, this opinion will be unpopular, but we need to spend to repair our creaking roads, bridges, subways, and schools and begin programs to build earthquake and hurricane resistant buildings, so that we have a shot at creating something other than brick and mortar tombs for residents faced with natural disasters.

A new infrastructure is not available at Wal-mart and we may need a NASA calculator because the cost will be so astronomical. But it would create something we don’t have enough of right now: jobs.

There’s the basic construction work of laying the foundations and other building activities, we’ll need more materials everything from vehicles to sheetrock which creates manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing and construction workers need to eat, meaning that new restaurants will spring up and existing ones have a new customer base and retail outlets pop up as more people have income to spend on something more than base necessities.

An infrastructure program is not cure all, our housing markets are still oversaturated and weak, and the stock market continues to have more loop to loops than anything at Six Flags, but at least we’d be walking in the right direction.