Half the money “wasted” in Iraq? You can make a good argument that the invasion was mistaken, and certainly it did not go as planned. However, the jury will be deliberating on Iraq for many more years. Wait for it.

The tax cuts had the intended effect of helping the economy, and INCREASED government revenues. There would have been less government money for infrastructure projects had the tax cuts not been passed. The current fears of their demise will soon have a ruinous effect on our economy, and government coffers. I suppose you will blame that on the rich as well?

Go ahead, have the last word, use it wisely.

In Minnesota, the MNDoT had the money in hand to replace the I35W bridge two or three times over. Preliminary NTSB reports place the blame in the design review. Using contemporaneous, ie 1960s, methods they identified 3 gusset plates that were drastically under-designed (actually 12 as they only looked at one quarter of the symmetric bridge).

I also understand that the bridge was designed so that a single point of failure (in this case, the gussets) would cause the bridge to fail.

I am not going to fault the bridge designers for that one, nor for the undersized gussets – these things happen. And computer modeling was not common when the bridge was designed.

A bigger problem is not bothering to put pilings in front of support structures because “traffic never comes up here” – yet that is exactly what happened in Oklahoma (barge hit bridge support) and Lousiana(?) when the Amtrak train derailed on a misaligned swing bridge that had been hit by a barge. Not to mention the Sunshine ??? bridge in Tampa that was hit by a freighter, and had to be replaced…

Bruce

Even in road-friendly states like Texas, it is becoming more and more difficult to get roads built and/or improved. The Environmentalists fight every road project tooth and nail, in the fantasy belief that rail will somehow replace 150M cars on the road.

Don’t leave out the trivial part that Texas/Gov Rick “Good Hair” Perry wants to sell all of those new roads, ie, make them toll roads. That tends to get the rest of the population geared up to fight new road construction.

Nah, stay where you are.

OTOH, since we have to borrow the money, and the people in charge will be the same people who couldn’t run the government on budget in the first place, I can’t believe the effects would really be positive. Instead, money that would have helped the overall economy will get siphoned off in taxes and some politicians will say they created jobs like there was no cost to it. For every job they create, some greater number were likely destroyed or aborted.

Even in road-friendly states like Texas, it is becoming more and more difficult to get roads built and/or improved. The Environmentalists fight every road project tooth and nail, in the fantasy belief that rail will somehow replace 150M cars on the road.

While I am for rail, I am not for rail to the exclusion of building new and improved roads and bridges. As Brock Yates stated in his op-ed the other day, cars are here to stay. Get over it. And if cars are here to stay, then just build the damn roads already.

I don’t think that’s accurate.

For instance, about halfway through the piece, Herbert mentions this little factoid: “According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in a study that should have gotten much more attention when it was released in 2005, it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over a five-year period to bring the U.S. infrastructure into reasonably decent shape.”

See, he mentiones money — the figure of $1,500,000,000,000 to be exact. What he doesn’t state with any specificity is where all that dough should come from, or even if that is a truly accurate figure (i.e. not inflated — civil engineers could always use more business). Which is fair enough, because no matter how you slice it and dice it, it is a huge problem beyond the scope of a mere editorial column.

The figure of $150,000,000,000 is well recognized today — it is the size of the proposed economic stimulus plan — and there is the implicit argument that all or a portion of that should go into public works projects instead of simple tax rebates. That’s 10% of the whole. Herbert also reported on the idea of a nationally chartered infrastructure bank, which could funnel private investment money into projects that seem to hold the promise of profit (toll roads, power infrastructure, waterworks).

I think Herbert’s point was a general, which befits the size and scope of his essay: In all our talk of economic stimulus and government rescue of the economy, we have good reason to spend on infrastructure projects, instead of or in addition to the proposed spending on tax rebates and social programs.