Thursday, November 15, 2012

U.S. now 25th in Infrastructure

begin quote from Fareed Zakaria from Time Magazine November 19, 2012 page 36:

"In the long run,  you cannot have robust growth without strong infrastructure. The U.S. has historically been world class in this regard. Only a decade ago we were ranked 5th in overall infrastructure by the World Economic Forum: today we have dropped to 25th. The American Society of Civil Engineers calculates that we have a 2 Trillion dollar backlog of repairs that must be done over the next 5 years to stay competitive." end quote from page 36 of the Nov. 19,2012 Time magazine.

Since the U.S. is not in a position to afford this outlay financially, and we are also not in a position to be able to survive not doing this economically and strategically, I propose and have proposed in previous blogs about how "Volunteerism combined with Engineers and qualified tradesmen and women could also solve this problem."

If we cannot afford to do it one way then we must use the "Barn Raising" approach of neighbor helping neighbor to "Get it Done!"

If you look at insignias of many bridges on roads throughout the U.S. you will see that the Civilian Conservation Core during the 1930s built many of the roads, bridges and government buildings at that time just before World War II.  We likely need something like this again because we cannot really afford to borrow even more money from foreign nations to rebuild our infrastructure. So, we must now get really creative to actually get it done to survive as a progressive nation through these times.

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