Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


INFRASTRUCTURE….Time to rebuild our nation’s infrastructure? Support for the idea is growing:

Public officials, engineers and policy experts have been warning for years that crumbling infrastructure is a ticking time bomb….A third of the nation’s major highways are in poor shape, according to the Department of Transportation. The list of unsafe dams is growing. Mass-transit systems, water-treatment plants, hazardous-waste sites and more are falling apart.

The civil engineers association gave the country a “D” on its 2005 infrastructure Report Card. It called for a $1.6 trillion five-year improvement program.

Now, sure, you’d pretty much expect a civil engineers association to back a program of civil engineering projects. Still, the time is right. The usual argument against infrastructure projects as fiscal stimulus is that they take too long: you have to identify projects and draw up plans first, and only then do you put people to work building stuff. By the time the projects get started, the recession is over.

But not this time. The recession we’re going into now promises to be deep and long, and a big slug of infrastructure improvements would not only be handy things to have, their timing is pretty good too. And politically it’s doable too since there are plenty of projects available for all 50 states.

McCain hasn’t bought into this because (I’d guess) he still doesn’t really appreciate the scope of our financial problems. Plus he probably associates infrastructure projects with earmarks, so he has a Pavlovian reaction against them. Obama has done a little better, but only a little. It would be smart, both politically and substantively, for him to at least start making more aggressive noises on a big, bold infrastructure plan.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate