Repairing all of the structurally deficient bridges in the country would take eighty years. And many of the worst are in California. This is a sign of a major societal dysfunction.
9 thoughts on “We Need To Increase The Rate”
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Repairing all of the structurally deficient bridges in the country would take eighty years. And many of the worst are in California. This is a sign of a major societal dysfunction.
Comments are closed.
In Oklahoma the hidden problem is that there is a series of earthen flood control dams that were built in the Depression Era that are reaching the end of their Best Use By™ period. They were built to alleviate the flash floods that were a yearly problem…
I am sure that each state has its own infrastructure problem in the same vein…
Nobody wants to cut spending and our friends to the left only want to raise taxes and then not spend the revenue on things government should actually spend money on.
Why wont spending get cut? Look how everyone freaks out about the possibility of a small cut to anything. Space nerds are some of the worst on this.
We will fix things as they break because no one will give up a bit of funding from programs and agencies they support.
“We will fix things as they break”
No, we won’t.
Sure, we’ll fix a few things here and there, but letting the essential infrastructure rot while blowing money on bread and circuses is the norm for societies on their way to collapse. There’s no money to fix it unless you slash the welfare state, and there are no votes in slashing the welfare state when such a large fraction of the population are reliant on it.
Just like that one spillway in california or any other natural disaster, we find the money after things get destroyed. It is not the best way, but it is the path of least resistance.
Here in CA it’s a generational thing. A lot of CA’s infrastructure was built either during the New Deal or during the gubernatorial administration of Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in the 50’s. Then his goofball son got elected governor in 1974, enabled public employee unions, and all the money started getting spent on government employee salaries, benefits and pensions. Between Jerry Brown’s first eight years as governor, 1975-83, and his most recent eight years, 2011-19, he has managed to destroy much of what both FDR and his father built.
Bridges and highways don’t vote or give you campaign contributions the way vastly expanding the ranks of government employees does.
It’s a political thing. Building new infrastructure is sexy and gets votes. Maintaining existing infrastructure does not.
This is why federal grants for hippy dippy road diets and other nonsense are so popular. But later, when you need more lanes so people can actually get around? No money for improvements and cities are stuck. Its almost as if that is the intention.
Not a new issue. When I started at an ABL bank back in the early ’00s one of things I looked at was infrastructure financing and I remember a paper from some engineering group or another indicating that it would take at least $40Bn just for basic remedial work on the nation’s infrastructure. Actually getting things up to snuff was much more.
So of course nothing was done. Whether they like it or not, the Baby Boom generation will go down as one of the worst in our nation’s history from a leadership perspective.