Of course you do.
There’s a real good chance you’ve crossed an unsafe bridge in the last
week or so.
Last year it was estimated that 61,000 bridges in the United States are
“structurally deficient.”
There’s a good chance you’ve driven across a few of them.
The thing is, nearly everywhere in America we’re way behind in
maintenance and repair of our highway and transportation infrastructure—the
roadways, bridges, tunnels, traffic lights, access ramps….
The American Society of Civil Engineers says we need to spend about
$3.3 TRILLION in the next 10 years to get back on track.
Only about $1.8 trillion is budgeted, and our feckless legislators
can’t be counted on to actually appropriate all that money.
We’re
in a hole, and it’s getting deeper.
TheHill.com
bluntly reported it this way:
“President Obama, speaking at a news
conference earlier this month, blamed the nation’s infrastructure woes on
Republicans who have ‘been resistant to really taking on this problem in a
serious way, and the reason is because of an ideology that says government
spending is necessarily bad.’ "
Let’s tell the whole truth: Democrats
in Congress and in state legislatures have also been unwilling to raise taxes
as needed to make our bridges and tunnels and roads safe, and make improvements
and expand capacity where needed.
For starters, we need to boost the
federal gas tax—it hasn’t been changed since 1993!—so that the people who use
our highways and bridges pay more to maintain them.
Every one of the states should be
increasing their state gas taxes to pay for state and local transportation
repairs.
And we’ll talk about mass transit
expansion another time.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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