Infrastruture

Infrastructure is always left behind by the politicians because it isn’t an attractive topic, especially for voters. It is also a boring subject because It is quite technical.

There are many infrastructure facilities in the US : damns, bridges, roads, pipelines...

For example, Damns used to be very popular facilities in the US during the fifties. Unfotunately, today, America’s Damns are in a state of serious disrepair. There are 84000 damns in the US, and the average age of a damn today in the US is 52 years. And the lack of maintenance of these damns make them very dangerous.

Although this figure is very alarming, many states pay no attention to their damn problems : For example, in Texas, in 2007, there was about 7400 damns. Unfortunately, only  7 inspectors were assigned to take a deeper look on those damns. Consequently, only 239 damns were inspected during this year. More alarmingly, there was no infrastructure inspectors at all in Alabama since 2007.

Furthermore, on the international level, the US had D+ rating for infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Other statistics from the World Economic forum  Global Competitiveness report showed that the USA ranked 16th in the quality of overall infrastructure.

And the consequences of the bad ifrastructure maintenance can be very disastrous. For instance, a pipe burst in UCLA and turned the campus into a « swimming pool » for more than 3 days.

Added to the high economic costs of bad infrastucture maintainance, there can be human costs at stake.

One of the most striking examples is Pittsburgh, the city of bridges, where the bridges situation is so poor because of the structural engineering strategy behind it (strategy from the fifties): for example, in order to minimize risks, the engineering team decided to build a bridge under a bridge :

However, Business representatives from The US chamber of commerce and labor representatives from the american federation of congress and indurstrial organizations-who rarely agree on any issue what so ever- agreed on the fact the infrastructure is an important issue today and that transportation infrastructure fundings should be increased.

Even Donald Trump made a statement about rebuilding the american infrastructure.

Despite all the urges for rebuilding the US infrastructure, the politicians seem to be deaf. Indeed, one of the biggest funds, the US highway trustfund, which is dedicated to support infrastructure maintenance projects, will be soon bankrupt ! In fact, this fund is primarely funded by the gaz tax fund. (18.4 cent/gallon gaz tax is attributed to the US Highway Trustfund), but the tax hasn’t increase to keep up with the inflation since 1993. More importantly, the gaz tax has actually gone down by 39% since 1993. This is due to the fact that raising the gaz tax is a highly impopular  in the US.

The lack of political urgency in tackling this problem is represented by speaker Boehner interventions for the last two years. He an American politician who served as the 53rd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015. He highlighted the fact that they were trying to find resources in order to rebuild the US infrastructure, but there was no concrete proposition on how to find those resources.

Today, there is an "Extra $1.44 trillion needed to rectify US infrastructure problems". 

source

Unfortunately, here are the concrete propositions from the two likely nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump about this issue :

« Hillary clinton will:

Boost federal investment by $275 billion over the next five years.

Create a $25 billion infrastructure bank to support critical infrastructure improvements.

Harness public and private capital to fix and build new roads and bridges, expand public transportation, give every American access to broadband internet, and more. »

 source

Donald trump made no official statement other than :

« I think it is crumbling and I think I can fix it. I  can do it faster and cheaper than anyone else... »

We will see how the next president will tackle this issue.