The broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees, and delayed flights that come from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.
I found the above quote on Stew Boyd's tumblr blog, underpaidgenius and he got it from this editorial at NYTimes.com by Bob Herbert who writes about how our country is falling apart. Here's a bit more from earlier in Herbert's piece:
We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.
We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.
Herbert makes it out to sound pretty bad, doesn't he? I've been saying for a while now that we've outsourced too many jobs and our money is on a one-way trip to Valuelessville. See, the value of our money is based on our country's ability to create value. Without jobs, there's no way to create value.
Now Herbert tells us our infrastructure is crumbling and our education system is failing us, as well. In other words, the very tools that allowed us to create jobs (and therefore value) are falling apart.
And he thinks the clock hasn't run out yet??
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