Building Trades News

Public Infrastructure is there to serve the publics’ needs for sanitary systems, potable water, electric power, educated children, provide medical care, house and provide training for our military, and transportation and merchandise transport. Of course business expects all of these public facilities to be provided so that they can do business and make a profit. And the public supports businesses use of public infrastructure for the jobs and incomes that are created when business does well.

If America is to remain strong, our infrastructure must be strong. However, by every measure, our infrastructure - roads, bridges, rail lines, power plants, water facilities, and sewage treatment plants—are all in need of expanded funding for maintenance and construction. The tragic failure of the Interstate 35W Bridge has exposed the neglect that has been allowed to become standard operating procedure and the resulting index of thousands of bridges that could fail.

California alone has huge deficiencies and is not budgeting the funds to even cover current infrastructure maintenance projects. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHA) has a mandate from Congress to inspect all of our country’s bridges under the 1968 Federal-Air Highway Act, and revisions in 1970 and 1978. The FHA issued its Nationnal Bridge Inspection Standards in 2004 and that standard requires inspections of bridges over 20 feet in span once every 6 years. According to a FHA report in 2006 there are 600,000 bridges nationwide and 70,000 of those are deemed "structurally deficient." California’s 12,500 State owned and 12,200 City or County owned bridges are in no better shape with over 12% of our bridges having some structural deficiencies. Michael Kinncaid of the American Society of Civil Engineers was recently quoted as saying that with all of the California Bond Initiatives that have been passed for roads, bridges, building and maintenance, "we think there’s a significant investment still needed of about $18 billion annually." When you hear these kinds of numbers you have to wonder what have our elected officials been thinking, "or not," cutting taxes for the rich while our infrastructure is coming down around our ears!

Again, the American Society of Civil Engineers’ estimates that $1.6 trillion is needed nationally for our infrastructure repair and renewal and with California’s infrastructure building and maintenance requirement of $18 billion annually I wonder where the money will be appropriated from with the "Know Nothing" administrations we have endured over the last quarter century. If these dollars are to be found it will have to be with a change in the current tax structure in both the United States and California and an expansion of middle class income earners as well.

The necessary funding for our infrastructure needs can only be raised when representatives can get back to supporting a sensible tax policy in this country – one that requires those who benefit the most from our economic system and public infrastructure to pay more.

We’re getting to the "point of no return" in our ability to tax middle income and low wage earners. When the numbers of projects that are needed to be funded exceed the capability of those taxpayers to pay the taxes needed to fund the projects, we will see a recession or worse in America. With more and more low pay, dead-end jobs, and with more and more low paid workers competing for the jobs and fewer and fewer of those workers paying taxes we will be incapable of funding the basic infrastructure needs of our citizens unless major changes are made in America’s entire economic policy. Every issue from Trade Policy, Foreign Investment and Corporate Nationalism to Capital Gains and Income Taxes, Workers’ Rights and Interest Rates must be reviewed by Congress and the next President with new and fair policies adopted to turn American business on its ear.

It’s big business that has gotten us to where we are today – with bridges falling down around our ears – and tax policies that reward people who have captured a larger and larger share of the pie and have no thought about sharing. Its only Congress and the next President who can build a bridge to a better, fairer and economically sound America in the future.