Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Crumbling American Infrastructure

The dramatic collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota a fortnight back,was,in some ways,more of a shock and a wakeup call to look into the huge decaying infrastructure of the country. America's infrastructure has an overall grade of D – or nearly failing – including roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works. Estimates are that it would take nearly $190 billion to fix just the country's failing bridges over the next two decades.The fixing of other infrastructure can take billions more.

According to a nytimes op-ed its difficult to replace decades old structural stuff as they are interconnected to a lot of other support systems. The more pressing issue is the availability of huge funds for the required changes and repairs.This would put the Federal Government into a huge debt and leave it bankrupt.

With the impending collapse of the housing market and of global credit markets, there are clear signs that the country is heading into another Great Depression. However,it may be able to pull out of it by injecting money into the economy in the form of massive public investment in infrastructure. But instead of borrowing the money from banks,leaving it massively in debt, the government should try creating debt and interest-free money with accounting entries and make the excess money generated to produce more goods and services just as Germany did in the decade following the first world war.

Whatever remedial measures that may be adopted, the problems cannot be easily wished away for a long time to come.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yeah..i totally agree with you on this..!!